Spurs star on ‘new lease of life’ under Robert Vilahamn and coffee shop future
Robert Vilahamn drinks 12 cups of coffee a day.
Technically, it’s espresso. That’s the Tottenham Hotspur Women’s head coach’s preferred mode of caffeine intake. And 12 is anecdotal. But sometimes it’s coffee and sometimes it’s 12. Because at 10 or 11 o’clock after an evening's football match with the post-match debrief done and the media duties dusted and the stadiums emptied, there’s generally only coffee.
So it’s two cups - sometimes pressed and brewed, sometimes via nimble Nescafé sachets and boiling water–carried onto the team bus for the schlep back to north London.
“And it’s like, how do you sleep ?”
Angharad James is laughing. The Spurs midfielder-turned-full back refrains from bandying around the tag coffee addict. Now the co-owner of Two Sides Grind - the nomadic, cosy coffee van James and her wife and Spurs teammate Amy Turner run together - the footballer knows the irresistible zhuzh that is a hot hit of the good stuff.
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Twelve coffees is also Vilahamn in a nutshell: passionate and never ceasing. Training sessions under the Swede invariably run long. Team meetings are meticulous and exhaustive in detail. New ideas run dissertation-length. Coffee is merely part of the formula.
For Tottenham Hotspur, the formula is working. The club that limped and dragged itself out of last season’s relegation scrapheap on the league’s penultimate weekend are now comfortably sitting in the table’s top half. An inescapable sense of new life thrums through a squad that is almost unrecognisable from last year. The football is slick and bold, hinged on pressing, possession and versatile conviction.
Freedom is the word James uses when discussing Vilahamn: A freedom to express oneself, a freedom to ask questions and pose solutions, a freedom to even make mistakes and learn from them. The notion works in tandem with what James considers the greatest shift this season, the team’s mentality.
“Last year was really difficult. We got ourselves into a bad situation where our goal from the start of the year had to change throughout,” she says.
“At first, we wanted to finish fifth. But as the season went on, we weren’t picking up points. We went nine games without a point. That’s really tough, to go through as a player, as a group. To get out of that showed a lot of character from us as a collective. At one point, we were favourites to get relegated.
“When we came in this year, we had new personnel, new management, we had time to reflect. There was a new lease of life but also our goal was to take it step by step. To see where this took us.”
Martha Thomas is one of the many players who have owed the freedom of expression under Robert Vilahamn to a key part in her success on the pitch (Photo by Ryan Pierse/Getty Images)The result has been nothing short of revolutionary and, after comprehensively defeating Arsenal for the first time in the club’s history back in December to culminate a tumultuous and volatile year, on the verge of epochal.
Which is all a round-about way of confirming that James is a ridiculously busy person. Life - an amalgamation of football redemption, a burgeoning coffee business, a less than one-year-old marriage to Turner, and a small dog named Betsy - is in that blurry stage, where days whip by and James doesn’t know how they manage it at such breakneck speed. Are they also chugging the metaphorical gunpowder that is 12 espressos? Should she?
James isn’t sure whether she likes this pace or not, but she’s making do. She and Turner’s coffee venture is still in its infancy but the signs are promising. The pair have regular customers, some who are loyal fans travelling as far as two hours to order a coffee and have a chat. Some are teammates (Vilahamn has yet to come, though London traffic is the apparent culprit). Some patrons have no idea the football background propping up their coffee sating, discovering this only upon querying why the van appears on Fridays and the odd Monday.
James laughs when recalling the various looks of shock on some customers’ faces upon learning her and Turner’s other life. Just six years ago, they’d have been coffee sellers by trade, footballers by hobby. Now, roles are reversed.
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Yet, the van is both a genesis point of a long-time dream for James, 29, and Turner, 32, and also a manifestation of the couple’s prudent forward thinking.
“We joke when we get into the conversation: If we were male footballers, then maybe we would’ve been able to go straight into a coffee shop, have people run it for us and we dip in and out when it suits us,” James says.
“The reality is that we're in no position to do that. Women's football is growing, but with the older, more experienced players, we’ve only been full-time for the last five or so years. So we haven’t got the big money savings that others might.”
James isn’t bitter as she explains her circumstances. She and Turner have been pivotal in pushing the women’s game to where it is now, from the WSL’s nascent professionalisation in 2018 to sell-out crowds and season-ticket holders.
Besides, the couple prefer to be on the ground, providing the chatter and coffee and creating a space uniquely theirs. The plan is for a second van soon, some summer festivals, eventually a brick and mortar shop somewhere dreamy.
The sentiment of looking forward is appropriate for a player often unheralded for her vision and anticipation. It was James in Spurs’ FA Cup fourth-round comeback victory over Sheffield United who picked out Bethany England with a sleek through-ball to offer a route back into the match. James’ calm and savvy on the ball is critical to Spurs’ success under Vilahamn, so much so the Swede has repurposed James at right-back, a position so foreign to James that she laughed when the manager initially informed her of the shift.
"It's not my preferred position," she says. "I like to be in the centre of the field where I can dictate play and be in the thick of it. But I've grew into into the right back role.
"I've adapted it to be a role that maybe suits me a little bit more. I like to come inside and create an extra midfield. I'm not a one taking on my opponent and getting forward.
"So that was something that I expressed to him that I'd have to adapt my role a little bit to suit the kind of player that I am. It's a new challenge. I guess at 29, I didn't expect this challenge at this point.
"But it's one that I've really tried to do my best. I make sure that I do extras every week in the position to be the best I can on the weekend. I get clips of the opposition every week to make sure that I'm as ready as I can be because I don't feel as confident there.
"I don't feel like I play as well in that position. I feel I can give a lot more in the midfield. But it's a role that I've accepted that I need to do for the team."
It's testament to what Spurs are cultivating that both manager and player can reach consensus that benefits the team, one hinged on mutual understanding of the other’s needs.
“He allows us to adapt our own role based on what we think, what we feel at the time and elaborate on why we made a certain decision. And there's never a right or a wrong answer,” James says. “But also, he expects a lot from us: be better on the ball, be more versatile, because that’s what’s needed for the team.”
The urge arises to use words like ‘revolution’ or attribute some idiosyncratic managerial tactic to Vilahamn’s success (like 12 daily espressos).
Angharad James has become a key cog in Robert Vilahamn's new-look Spurs (2023 The Arsenal Football Club Plc)Which isn’t to say Spurs’ have relished a seamless metamorphosis. An eight-match undefeated run crumbled into back-to-back league losses to Manchester City and Manchester United by an aggregate scoreline of 11-0 towards the end of last year. A penalty shoot-out loss to Arsenal in the Conti Cup group stages threatened to compound a lurking sense of deflation, the murmurs that maybe all this talk had been a tad impetuous.
The North London derby triumph stymied the noise for now. But while optimism around the club is high, James remains measured.
“We're not a top four team right now. We're not ready for it. We don't compete consistently enough against the top four sides. But that's where we want to get to,” she says.
“I believe that this year is going to be a good marker for us and a good building year for the future because I think Spurs will be a top four or five side in the next few years, as long as we keep to the philosophy and the style of play that's being played now.
“We're going to make mistakes because it's new to us. The men go through the same experience where they have a really good run of games and then they dip a little bit because they're making the same mistakes. But they're learning from it. They're still trying to do what the manager asks them to do.
“That's where we were just before the Arsenal game. We're still trying to do what we're asked to do. And it'll come through in the end. It's an exciting time to be at the club.”
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