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Much-travelled coach Santana always strums good tune

Head coach of Brazil's Flamengo Joel Santana gestures to his players during their Copa Libertadores football match against Argentina's Lanus at the Joao Havelange stadium in Rio de Janeiro April 12, 2012. REUTERS/Sergio Moraes

By Andrew Downie RIO DE JANEIRO (Reuters) - Joel Santana has just led Vasco da Gama into Brazil's Serie A, has won the Carioca title with all four Rio clubs and, while he is famous for TV ads that spoof his poor English, his football feats speak for themselves. In a game where true characters are proving harder and harder to find, the much-travelled coach stands out. Santana has been in charge of more than 20 clubs in his career, including most of Brazil's biggest sides and teams in Japan and Saudi Arabia. He is the only coach to land the Carioca state championship with all four of Rio's big teams, Botafogo, Flamengo, Fluminense and Vasco. Santana is probably better known in his country than any other coach apart from Luiz Felipe Scolari, thanks in large part to a hugely successful advertising campaign where he spoofs his well-known difficulty with the English language. "You have to be possessed by your cause otherwise you won't be successful," Santana told Reuters in an interview overlooking Copacabana beach. "Players and staff need to know who their leader is and that they will be with them in both the good times and the bad," said the 65-year-old who led Vasco back into Serie A -- the national first division -- last month. The veteran coach is known as Papai Joel, a play on Papai Noel, Portuguese for Father Christmas. That is partly because he was born on Dec. 25 and is named Joel Natalino (Christmas) Santana but is also down to his avuncular nature and the fact he saved Flamengo from relegation in December one year. "Only a father helps a club. I've done it six, seven, eight times in Rio," he said. "Once I took over at Flamengo and there was a 95 percent chance they would go down. "It was around Christmas and when I got them out of danger the newspaper O Globo wrote the headline, Papai Joel Exists." FORWARD PLANNING The ability to take over a struggling club and turn their season around is his speciality and, in a country where forward planning is inversely proportional to innate talent, it has served him well. Santana knows better than most that Brazilian football is at an all-time low, with fewer great players than ever before and bad management endemic. He said he was owed money by three or four former clubs and many of his players are too. Vasco played twice a week this season with long flights in between, making planning almost impossible. "I was at Vasco three weeks before I found time to do tactical training," said Santana who is in his fifth spell with the club. "You do recreational training, volleying, one touch. The training is more to shake off the tiredness of the air travel than to do anything objectively." Critics say he is less a coach, more a motivational speaker, and argue his teams are rarely attacking, much less tactically brilliant. MANGLED ENGLISH But Santana's appeal has grown and it stems from a post-match TV interview he did while managing South Africa in 2009. He was still learning English at the time. His mangled syntax became the butt of jokes in Brazil but Pepsi offered him a job spoofing himself as a beach-side translator. The advert won a top prize and he was inundated with other offers. Santana's new shampoo ads, with the great Pele as a support act, have had more than 50 million views on YouTube. "It was a really great thing to do," he said. "Companies had always asked me and I was never brave enough to do it, I thought it was not for me." What also is not for him is retirement, at least not just yet. Santana wants to coach for another couple of years and has ruled out returning to Botafogo to try and get them out of Serie B. "People stopped me in the street today and said, 'Joel, take over Botafogo and get us out of the second division'. "I said, 'Again?'. Papai Joel can't take it any more. Give me Barcelona or Real Madrid," he joked. (Editing by Tony Jimenez)