Remember me
New Chelsea manager season seems to come around earlier and earlier every year. The latest in the hot seat, Liam Rosenior, cruised to a comfortable (if expected) 5-1 victory over Charlton on Saturday in the FA Cup, though tonight’s Carabao Cup semi-final against Arsenal will present much more of a challenge. Not that Rosenior is letting the pressure get to him. “I’m not arrogant. I’m good at what I do,” he said at his first official press conference, pointing to his success in his previous gig managing Strasbourg.
Having a peek at his wrist might indicate that this is more than first-week-in-the-job bravado. Rosenior’s watch of choice is no hyper-niche model it takes a horological conference to identify. It is, very simply, a Rolex Datejust. This is not a complicated watch. It only has the one complication, in fact, in the form of (you guessed it) a date display. It’s a popular model, a mainstay of the Rolex catalogue since 1945, and almost one of the simplest, slotting between the time-only Oyster Perpetual and the Day-Date, which has (you guessed it) an additional day-of-the-week complication.
So: a “does what it says on the tin” timepiece for a manager who is not interested in unnecessary flash. It’s steel, with a smooth bezel rather than the model’s common (slightly fancier) fluted variation, and no lah-di-dah Roman numerals on the watch face. “Nothing tactical, nothing technical” – Rosenior’s succinct summary of his approach to the Charlton game – could equally apply to his Rolex. Not for him the blinged-out or ultra-technical pieces favoured by many of his players – Cole Palmer’s Daytona, white-gold Day-Date and Richard Mille setup easily outpaces the gaffer, not that that makes much difference to who’s in charge in the dugout.
Rosenior’s Datejust is relentlessly minimalist even for a Datejust. Arne Slot, his counterpart at Liverpool, has a Datejust with a shiny slate dial and an intricate Jubilee bracelet. The Chelsea man has one with a simpler, less dressy Oyster bracelet, and a plain black dial – factory spec, basically. It speaks to how he sets up his teams to play – simple and direct and not overly tinkered with.
That said, this is not a guy allergic to complexity – he was studying a book on football tactics aged nine – but it seems like, as with his in game management style, he wants to keep things very simple on his wrist, at least for now. After all, he has more on his mind than fussing over his watch’s minor cosmetic details. (As we all would, had we just been appointed to the biggest job of our career: the last British club Liam Rosenior managed was Hull City.)
And given he’s not been seen wearing any other notable time-teller, Rosenior’s apparent one-watch-guy status acts as a reassurance, to Chelsea fans and players weary of the management merry-go-round, that he’s going into the position with a level of loyalty to the club. Everyone involved will be hoping – with good reason – that the man with the Datejust has a career measured in more than days.