Almost every time Leonardo Jardim, whose Al Hilal meet the Champions of Europe on Wednesday, comes across Thomas Tuchel, the manager of Chelsea, the circumstances are less than ideal.
Covid restrictions in Abu Dhabi oblige Tuchel to oversee his first Club World Cup fixture remotely, communicating from afar with his assistants Zsolt Low and Arno Michels.
The first time Tuchel and Michels took on a Jardim side, also with high stakes, far graver safety issues shaped events.
It was April 2017 and Jardim was in charge of a dashing Monaco. They were setting the pace in a French Ligue 1 where the front-runners are normally assumed to be Paris Saint-Germain.
Jardim’s team had just knocked Manchester City out of the Champions League, an achievement that earned a quarter-final against Borussia Dortmund, then being coached by Tuchel, with Michels alongside him.
As the bus carrying the Dortmund players and staff travelled to the Westfalenstadion, a bomb was detonated by the side of the road, causing injuries to a policeman, and, as a window shattered, to the Dortmund defender Marc Bartra.
The match - the first leg of the tie - was postponed, though only until the next day, much to Tuchel’s disgust. He saw the psychological impact on his players of the frightening blast, which had deliberately targeted the Dortmund bus. The bomb was planted, a court later found, by a man seeking to profit from a sharp, sudden fall in Dortmund’s share value.
Monaco won the rearranged fixture 3-2, and would go on to extend their margin of victory with a 3-1 win in the second leg. Though the outcome of that tie was always coloured by the horrific prelude, there was no question that Jardim had fashioned an exceptional Monaco team.
That was the Monaco season when a teenaged flyer, by the name of Kylian Mbappe, announced himself as a superstar for a generation. It was the year that young players such as Bernardo Silva, now of City, Thomas Lemar, now of Atletico Madrid, and Fabinho, now of Liverpool, became coveted talents.
It was the season Monaco deposed PSG as French champions, and Jardim, inscrutable and studious, added his name to the long list of admired and adaptable Portuguese coaches collecting major prizes abroad. He had come to France bearing a reputation for tactical caution. His Monaco won Ligue 1 scoring 107 goals in their 38 games.
Like Tuchel, Jardim went into coaching young, with no significant CV as a player to push him up the ladder. Like Tuchel, a record of uplift at various clubs in his own national league guided him to silverware abroad.
Jardim’s Monaco success, following successful spells at Olympiakos and Sporting Lisbon, would indirectly impact on the course of Tuchel’s career.
PSG, pushed into second place in the French hierarchy after four league titles on the trot, contacted the German during the following year, earmarking him to take over from Unai Emery. The ambitious Paris superclub, who had snatched Mbappe from Monaco, appointed Tuchel their manager in the summer of 2018.
His first match in charge? The French Trophee des Champions, the equivalent of a domestic Super Cup. Tuchel’s PSG beat Jardim’s Monaco 4-0, hastening the end of Jardim’s first stint there.
The club from the Principality later reflected hard on what Jardim had given them, notably, a knack of maturing younger players, and asked Jardim back, barely three months after firing him. But Tuchel’s PSG were not for toppling.
The last Tuchel-Jardim encounter in France told the story of how buying up the best native talent in Ligue 1 had realigned the hierarchy. In April 2019, Tuchel’s PSG emphatically beat Jardim’s downsized Monaco 3-0, with an Mbappe hat-trick against his former club.
Jardim ended his second stint in French football, sacked again by Monaco, in December that year. Twelve months later, almost to the day, PSG fired Tuchel.
Both would bounce back with a continental title in double-quick time.
Tuchel famously delivered a Uefa Champions League within 123 days and 30 matches of his appointment, mid-season, as Frank Lampard’s successor at Chelsea.
Al Hilal made Jardim the successor to his Portuguese compatriot, Jose Morais, in June 2021. His 13th game in charge, 174 days after his appointment, would be the victorious Asian Champions League final against Pohang Steelers.
Jardim’s debut at the Club World Cup set a record for the competition, the weekend’s 6-1 win over Al Jazira an unprecedented margin in the modern Fifa format.
The tally of goals from his head-to-head against clubs managed by Tuchel suggests tonight should be lively, too. In four meetings, there have never been fewer than four goals in the 90 minutes.
