Tottenham Hotspur supporters have already seen Roberto De Zerbi keep their team in the Premier League. They have noted his passion, warmed to his enthusiasm. But De Zerbi ball had to wait.
Now, Spurs must be ready to embrace the real thing. And the most obvious conduit to help his ideas take shape is Jan Paul van Hecke. The Dutchman has been brought in for £52m from Brighton not just because of his talent but because he is already au fait with De Zerbi's unique approach.
That matters because the full-fat version of his football can be complicated, even for professionals. Lewis Dunk, the erstwhile centre-back partner of Van Hecke at Brighton, has been open about feeling utterly lost during the first weeks of De Zerbi's time there. Having spoken about this to Anatoliy Trubin, De Zerbi's goalkeeper at Shakhtar Donetsk, he talked of his team-mates almost having to unlearn all that they had learned about football up to that point.
"He opened a new way of playing," Trubin told Sky Sports. James Milner thought he had seen everything football could throw at him, having been coached by Terry Venables and Sir Bobby Robson as a youngster before winning the Premier League under Manuel Pellegrini and Jurgen Klopp. But De Zerbi was different.
Speaking to Milner, he talked of De Zerbi helping him to understand "how a team plays and why it happens" like no manager that he had worked with before. "He wanted each player in this exact position and to time their movements," Milner told Sky Sports. "Finding that free man and how you do that is something that you have maybe done a lot in your career but not realised you were doing it.
And then, [working with De Zerbi] pieces together exactly how that works and gives you a deeper understanding again." It will have been a hectic pre-season for his players, particularly those expected to build the play. Because what might look like free-flowing football from back to front is the product of prescribed movements developed through constant repetition in training. "I remember one situation, I played a good ball, but it was not the way how we need to do it and he screamed a lot," recalls Trubin.
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