Ranieri: Di Matteo must win Chelsea the FA Cup or Champions League to become Villas-Boas' successor

Posted Monday, April 16, 2012 by YAHOO Sport

Ex-Chelsea manager Claudio Ranieri believes Roberto Di Matteo must win either the Champions League or the FA Cup to be named Andre Villas-Boas' permanent successor.

The Italian has won nine of his 12 games in charge including an emphatic 5-1 win over Tottenham in the FA Cup semifinal to stake his claim to be full-time boss and the Italian has been impressed so far with his results.

"Roberto [Di Matteo] has started very well," Ranieri told BBC Sport. "Roberto is the right man to do something good there.

"If he achieves the FA Cup and fourth place, then why not? Experience is not necessarily important.

"Which is the most important? They both are. It is the easy answer but it is the truth.

"It is important for the next season to finish in the top four and make the Champions League, but it is also very important for the club to win the FA Cup."

Ranieri feels the downfall of Villas-Boas was that he tried to change the team over a short period of time and believes the Portuguese has a lot of potential as a manager despite his failure at Stamford Bridge.

"[Andre] Villas-Boas is clearly a good manager - he won a lot at Porto. Look at Pep Guardiola at Barcelona too - he also started very young at a big club," Ranieri

"Your age is not important. What is important is the ideas you transmit to your players.

"Villas-Boas was unlucky because he wanted to do something new. But there is a team there with experienced players and it is important to use them in the right way.

"If you put in younger players only sometimes, rather than change things a lot, then that is how I would do it."

The former Inter Milan boss also reflected on Chelsea’s defeat to Monaco in the Champions League semifinal in 2004 when he was in charge.

Ranieri feels if the Blues had managed to hold onto a two-goal lead in the game life would have been different for him and the team, as he was sacked at the end of the season following the failure to reach the final.

"I will always remember that match because we were very unlucky," he recalled.

"If it had finished 2-0 to us, it would have changed the result of the match. If it changed the match, it would have changed my life. It would have changed everything."