It’s a fascinating bit of found art (see below the jump), one that spurred the Gazzetta Dello Sport to two separate articles and the Guardian’s Richard Williams to wonder what might have been if the Chelsea manager Andre Villas-Boas had gone for Sturridge as a centre-forward, with Terry and Lampard both starting, against Napoli.

None of that happened. Normally we’d assume here the note was faked, although Williams offers less-than-compelling evidence it isn’t:

Whether Villas-Boas had left the paper behind in the knowledge that it would be found, as a kind of black propaganda to fool his opposite number, will probably never be known — assuming he really did write it, of course, although the use of the names “Ash”, “Studge” and “Raul” (for his compatriot Meireles) indicated authenticity.

I’m probably not alone in hoping it was real. Everything we know about managers comes almost exclusively from touchline cameras documenting their every nervous tic; that and post-match press conferences in which they disagree with every negative characterization thrown their way. Once in a while, they’ll say something insightful, perhaps a reason for a formation preference. Otherwise, it ends up as match report filler.

A lot of the time though they’re seen furiously scribbling things on notepads, photos that are inevitably the popular subject of various Internet captions mad libs. Tactically though, we can only speculate on a manager’s game plan based on the available evidence—what we see on TV. When a particular strategy doesn’t work, as in the case of Chelsea yesterday against Napoli, a part of us still assumes—right or wrongly—that the manager had a plan.

There is a substrata of football nerd that would die to see some of these notes, or to sit in the dressing room during a game plan. At the very least, a nice tumblr featuring those rare photos of in-use chalkboards would be nice. Get on it, Internet.

The Note