As interim-coach Hiddink last season Hiddink impressed the London club to such an extend that they told him he could return in any role possible, as the board of the club told him six months ago.

New manager Carlo Ancelotti reacted with his arms wide open: "Guus is most welcome. We are friends. And when Guus comes to Chelsea I can take some time off during the season."

That joke could have come from Hiddink himself, as he and Ancelotti share some character treats that are rare in football: fanaticism and the ability to relativize. They are not the only two comparisons of the two coaches.

"They both have a perfect feeling for the people they work with," Frank Lampard said on a press conference last week.

"That personal touch is very important."

I have experienced both coaches from close by on one of the rare moments when football life wasn't smiling at them.

I met Ancelotti an hour and a half after he had been on the losing end of one of the most insane Champions League finals in history.

The final in Istanbul in 2005, when Liverpool came back from being 3-0 down in five minutes.

After that crazy match I ended up in the hotel of AC Milan and saw what an unexpected defeat does to athletes.

Like rejected dogs they hung around in the lobby and in the restaurant, their eyes full of disbelieve and anger. An icy silence all about them.

Except at the table where Ancelotti was having a meal while talking to his wife and team psychologist Bruno Demichelis.

I vaguely knew the latter and he invited me to join them at their table. As they continued their conversation I was amazed to notice that they never once talked about the defeat they suffered earlier that night.

"There's nothing we can do about that now," was the only thing Ancelotti said about it, and he asked me about my experiences in metropolis Istanbul.

He even listened to the answers.

Then he asked me for a cigarette, joked with some of the staff members and walked to his room while humming a tune.

Great winners are often great losers.

Over a year later that other metropolitan displayed the same dignity.

It was less than 24 hours after he and Russia had been kicked out of the 2006 World Cup by a dubious Italian penalty in the German village of Titisee.

Hiddink was to be a guest in a Dutch TV show later that evening, but first he took his time to have a grilled fish on the terrace.

On a big screen behind him Brazil were playing Ghana. Hiddink didn't look at it once second.

And like Ancelotti had done a year earlier Hiddink hardly mentioned the dramatic game of the night before.

"Let's not talk about football for a while," Hiddink said and ordered another bottle of wine. "There's nothing we can do about it now."

When all goes as expected they will be united at Stamford Bridge; Ancelotti as manager and Hiddink as Director of Football, as the English papers are saying.

Two birds of a feather, friends even. Ambitious men with an eye for the relativity of life in football.

One would almost start to think of Chelsea as a sympathetic club.

Simon Zwartkruis, Voetbal International

"The intellectualisation
of football has
always foundered
on a simple problem-
-the players. Doing
all your most
rewarding thinking
with your feet seems
to dull the philo-
sophical impulse.
Unless, of course,
you are Dutch.
According to legend,
Europeans played
a moronic, muscular
version of the world's
game, until Holland
proclaimed its vision
of total football in the
1974 World Cup,
and enlightenment
dawned."

From:
Brilliant Orange: The Neurotic Genius of Dutch Football