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Virgin Islands recall their days in the sun under former coach

Andre Villas-Boas has become the most talked-about manager in world football since agreeing to take charge of Chelsea, but when he started his first job as coach of British Virgin Islands 11 years ago the players could not pronounce his name.

The Portuguese prodigy was just 21 when he became the youngest international manager by taking charge of the BVI team, as part of his role as the tiny Caribbean nation's technical director of football.

His captain Avondale Williams, a central midfielder who has now succeeded Villas-Boas as national team manager, remembered yesterday how the players, many of whom were several years older than their new boss, struggled with his unfamiliar names and called him Luis – pronounced Lewis.

"He didn't mind us calling him that, we certainly respected him," Williams told The Independent yesterday from his home in BVI, a British dependent territory with a population of just 22,000, famous for its glorious beaches and its offshore banking industry, and to a lesser extent its rum production and drug trafficking.

Villas-Boas had taken a post as the country's technical director of football without revealing just how young he was. He said a few years later: "I was basically the country's coach. I was a kid, but they didn't know that. I only told them my age the day I left the post. It was such a grand job for a 21-year-old."

Despite his youth Villas-Boas managed to make his mark on a country that was ranked 161 in the world, and whose national stadium is a ramshackle sports venue known as the Sherly Ground, capacity 2,000 or so, in the capital Road Town.

Williams said: "He was about two years younger than most of us, but impressed us. He came in with a programme for us and we were all very interested. He was very keen to share his ideas about the game."

Villas-Boas set about the monumental task of trying to make the BVI team – who are known as the "Nature Boyz" – a more competitive outfit by instilling in them a sense of purpose. Chelsea's new manager was famous for writing detailed dossiers on the opposition in his previous spell at Stamford Bridge during Jose Mourinho's reign, but kept things fairly simple with the enthusiastic amateurs of BVI.

"He told us that we had to put the team first," Williams said. "He got us passing the ball better, and put the emphasis on attacking. But he also got us defending better as a team. He had a lot of ideas that were quite different to us.

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