His record may justify portraying him as more of a bruiser than a schmoozer but the reputation Luiz Felipe Scolari carries to Chelsea is hardly enough to make players, reporters or fellow managers in these parts consider equipping themselves with gumshields and hiring cut-men. Big Phil’s pugilistic tendencies have spilled ink rather than blood and the main relevance of the stories about outbursts of physicality is probably as reinforcement of belief in the dissent-discouraging effect his substantial presence and unyielding attitudes can have on a squad of footballers.

He certainly looks like the right man to establish and sustain authority over what has sometimes been a rabble of egos in the dressing room at Stamford Bridge. But positive assumptions don’t come so easily when the question is whether the combative independence he has exhibited at every stage of his career thus far will remain impervious to the pressurising opinions of a billionaire owner who is paying him wages that dwarf the best he has previously earned. Malleability can show in unlikely places if defiance jeopardises an annual salary in the region of £6m.

Those who know Scolari well insist that with him absolute autonomy in team matters is non-negotiable but the same abhorrence of compromise was attributed to Jose Mourinho until he tolerated the imposed acquisition of Andriy Shevchenko and several other blatant indignities inflicted by Roman Abramovich. The disintegration of the alliance that had brought Chelsea two Premier League championships and success in the FA Cup and the League Cup (twice) in three seasons was no doubt due to problems deeper than such public examples of insulting interference but it’s hard to avoid thinking Mourinho’s reign was doomed to premature termination the moment he and everybody else knew that his loudest proclamations of how special he was could be drowned out by the rustle of Abramovich’s banknotes. The sound obviously became more agreeable to Mourinho when his refusal to be tempted into impaling himself on principles paid off and he was handsomely compensated for a dismissal that left his marketability undiminished.

At 59, Scolari need not regard this new job as his last major opportunity in club management. However, after seven years of working with the national teams of his native Brazil and of Portugal, he will be anxious to provide instant evidence that he has not mislaid the winning formula for week-to-week action he developed between the early 1990s and the turn of the century in the league and cup competitions of his homeland (and, with Gremio and Palmeiras, in the wider South American context of the Copa Libertadores). Even for a football nomad who has experienced the game in exotic locations - he had coaching engagements in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Japan long before he came to Europe - the Premier League will be strange and perhaps peculiarly taxing terrain. But the most testing challenge may be navigating a way through the obsessions, whims and impulses that tend to be manifested in Abramovich’s involvement with Chelsea.

It is undeniably natural for somebody who has poured a vaultful of money into a project to want to have a direct influence on how it is run. But surely there is validity in the old counter-argument that it makes little sense to enlist the services of a distinguished architect if you are then going to scrawl your own half-baked ideas across his designs. Yet that analogy is patently inapplicable to this case, since Abramovich appears disinclined to have any truck with the architectural approach to creating a successful team. He apparently sees prefabrication as the key to realising his vision of taking Chelsea, by way of that elusive triumph in the Champions League, to the top of the football world. The policy is to spare no expense in gathering up fully finished components for assembly in west London. Other leading clubs in England and elsewhere are, plainly, just as eager to buy in outstanding players when they become available but the unique economics of Chelsea encourage them to rely on their purchasing power, and to disdain traditional methods of team-building, to an extent that perhaps only Real Madrid can (or would wish to) rival.

Though he won’t appreciate the blithe suggestions in the media that he should be able to launch his regime by effortlessly luring his compatriot Kaka away from Milan, Scolari is entitled to feel he is well suited to the task of supervising Chelsea’s modified version of the galacticos system. He has demonstrated that his strength as a disciplinarian can be impressively complemented by motivational skills sufficiently subtle to extract maximum performance from brilliant but complicated players. His handling of Ronaldo, Rivaldo and Ronaldinho in the 2002 World Cup finals ensured, admittedly with some conspicuous help from Sven the Inert, that a seriously flawed Brazil squad emerged as champions. If never accused of tactical profundity, he has frequently revealed a capacity for affecting big games with bold decisions, particularly in the drafting in of substitutes.

Whether or not Portugal maintain their splendid contribution to the hitherto lavish entertainment of Euro 2008 all the way to glory in the final (and so compensate for the worst blemish on Scolari’s CV, the loss to the honest artisans of Greece in the Lisbon climax of Euro 2004), Big Phil must be judged worthy of the job he has landed. He should punch his weight in the Premier League - metaphorically of course.

Blind to Stanford’s Twenty20 vision

Cricketers would have to be strange creatures to refrain from exulting over the recent developments in their game that are belatedly giving them at least a taste of the financial plenty in which professional footballers have long been wallowing. And the rest of us must admit to being even more peculiar (not to mention shamefully mean-spirited) if we begrudge those who earn their living with bat and ball the promise of unprecedented rewards associated with the popularity of Twenty20 matches. Joining wholeheartedly in the celebrations would be entirely natural if some of the beneficiaries of the swift spread of the hectic new format were less intent on dismissing as a thickskulled reactionary anybody inclined to regard it as little more than a bit of rapid-fire fun that happens to be a cash-generating phenomenon.

Listening to the more evangelical voices is enough to promote feelings of inadequacy in those of us who aren’t quite able to see Twenty20 as an admirable evolutionary enhancement of the aesthetic pleasures of cricket. Still, I am resigned to being unable to shed the stick-in-the-mud conviction that the best of Twenty20 action is to a great Test match what a cheap soundbite is to Churchillian oratory. It is, of course, a belief that heightens concern about the possible long-term impact of the present boom in 40-over contests on the game at Test level. A conflict of priorities is undoubtedly looming, for young players deciding how they mean to shape their careers and ultimately for the sport as a whole.

Nor will the debate be free of ardent campaigning. Allen Stanford, the Caribbean-based Texan who is staking the staging of five Twenty20 matches in the West Indies between England and a Stanford All-Stars XI, with the total £10m purse money for each of the annual confrontations going to the winning side, is noisily vehement about his hatred of Test cricket and never neglects an opportunity to declare that the kind of excitement he is offering is the future of the game. We have seen the future, and some of us aren’t sure it works.

Wonder of Woods

Regardless of what happened to Tiger Woods in the third round of the US Open that he was due to complete in the early hours of this morning British time, his Friday performance on the Torrey Pines course near San Diego will stay with me as one of the most dramatic and impressive sights of this or any other golfing year.

He went into the championship after being kept out of competition for two months by knee surgery and from the moment he teed off on Thursday it was obvious his left leg was causing him serious trouble. His first round was a defiant, one-over-par 72 but on Friday his opening nine holes cost him 38 strokes and he was limping so noticeably and grimacing so often that expert witnesses thought he might be forced to retire. Instead, starting his inward half at the first hole, he shot five threes in a row and kept the miracles going to finish with a 68.

Don’t tell me he isn’t the most compelling sportsman now at work.