So I am not desperate to get headlines, I just want to do what pleases me the most.”I don’t care that I could be on TV more, or that we could have bigger crowds, that’s not what being a manager is about. It’s about doing the job in the best possible way.”Obviously the target here is different from Chelsea, but trying to improve the players you have, that is the same I feel really excited As a manager I can fulfil my ambitions here. Which is not just to get promoted but to build a firm foundation, so that the club is stable once we do get promoted.”I want Watford to be a Premiership club like Charlton and Fulham, without relegation worries. So when we sign players, we must make sure they are players good enough to play in the Premiership. Then the core of the team is already here.”These are laudable aims, but 12th in the First Division is no place to be talking about the Premiership. First, Watford must haul themselves up the table, to which end Vialli has been busying himself with things off the field as much as on it.”I have tried to give the players everything they need to perform at their best,” he says, “in terms of the medical department, the fitness coach, and so on.

Obviously I have my own ideas, but I need support from the directors It needs money. I need the directors to believe that what I’m doing is the right thing, and so far I have been given all possible backing.”According to seasoned Watford observers, he has indeed wrought quite a revolution behind the scenes. One local newspaper reporter told me that the club programme now has a “Meet the backroom staff” feature. “If they’d had that in seasons gone by,” he said, “they would have run out of subjects by the time they’d done the kit man and the woman who makes the tea. But it’s still going, which shows how many people Luca has brought in.”By appointing Vialli, the board was effectively giving its consent to this overhaul of the Taylor regime.”There were two possibilities when Graham Taylor decided to leave,” he says.

“Either they could have a typical English manager, or someone with a European style. I told them what I needed, and they told me the budget, and what the club does for the community. After that we talked another few times, then I made my mind up to come.”Since his acrimonious departure from Chelsea (which still seems bewildering when you consider that during his tenure the club won 76 games out of 144, losing 29, and picked up four trophies) plenty of Italian jobs were dangled before him, not least by his old club Sampdoria, where his stature remains almost messianic (when he took Watford to play in a pre-season game against Sampdoria, one local fan practically threw himself in front of the team bus in homage).But Vialli resisted the offers from Italy, stayed here, and knuckled down to complete a Football Association coaching course.”I wanted to be a manager in England again,” he explains. “So it was better for me to get my coaching skills in an English environment, learning as much as possible about the English philosophy. You learn from playing the game, and watching the game, and from the techniques of other managers, but you have to put all these things together to achieve a coaching method of your own. The FA licence helps you to organise all your thoughts until you have a method”Again, though, the question has to be asked: why England? “I love sport,” he says, softly “And sport with a capital letter is here.