Mourinho: Further Anatomy of a Winner

by Patrick Barclay

  At 8.45, Stark’s whistle started a strange contest. Real stood off Barcelona, much as they had done in the final of the Copa del Rey, Spain’s equivalent of the FA Cup, on the neutral ground of Valencia a week earlier, and the return Liga fixture at the Bernabéu four days before that. In both matches, the tactic had proved effective. In Madrid, despite the dismissal of Raul Albiol for the foul on David Villa that led to Messi scoring from the penalty spot, Real forced a draw through another penalty, converted by Cristiano Ronaldo. But Mourinho, correctly believing that Real could not overtake Barcelona in the Liga, had been just practising for the cup final, in which the clogging of Barcelona’s channels of attack by Pepe and company again worked but, in addition, chances were made to score. In extra-time Ronaldo got the only goal with a thrilling header. Real, after nine months of Mourinho, had their first trophy in three years.

  Misgivings among the Real support about Mourinho’s pragmatism were receding fast and many in the crowd who gathered for the Champions League semi-final were ready to accept 0–0 if it were part of the Special One’s plan. Caution, after all, was permissible if applied successfully to matches against Barcelona. On the Saturday night before this one, Real had returned to Valencia, the scene of their cup-final triumph, for a Liga match and won 6–3. The goals came from Gonzalo Higuaín (three), Kaká (two) and Karim Benzema. All three scorers were now on the bench. Pepe was back in the midfield, alongside Lassana Diarra. Angel di Maria was sent to join Ronaldo up front. Except that the team did not seem to have a front. It was set up wholly to defend, at least in the first half, which soon turned sour. Mourinho’s team had been described by Guardiola as the most aggressive Real Madrid he had ever seen and, while they did not let him down, Barcelona were only too obviously ready for the tough tackling that ensued, repeatedly tumbling and appealing to Stark for justice. Eventually, after an hour, Pepe went in high on Dani Alves and yet again Real were down to ten men. Ibrahim Affelay, on for Pedro, made a goal for Messi, who flicked in the substitute’s short cross before the little Argentine slalomed through the Real defence to claim a goal of such virtuosity that it was rightly compared to Diego Maradona’s classic second against England in the World Cup of 1986.

  Mourinho’s tactical plans had been comprehensively shredded this time and, if it had been the second leg, Guardiola might have been tempted to use them as ticker-tape in the celebrations. Why had Real played so defensively on their own ground? It may be that Mourinho, fortified by his success in the cup final, had been trying to lure Barcelona’s defenders forward – Gerard Piqué seldom needs an invitation and he did move into midfield several times – in the hope of getting the quick men Ronaldo and Di Maria into vacated space. But there was no service coming through and Ronaldo, who had been angrily gesturing to that effect from the early stages, pointedly remarked afterwards: ‘I didn’t like it, but I have to adapt to what they ask me to do.’

  Meanwhile Mourinho ranted. For his dismissal to the stands, he was automatically banned from the second leg, in which Pedro scored for Barcelona and Marcelo equalised on the night. No one was sent off but Mourinho’s assistant Aitor Karanka complained that Higuaín had had a goal disallowed, adding: ‘Mourinho was right. He said it would be impossible for us to go through.’ By then UEFA had added four matches to Mourinho’s ban for a form of behaviour so inflammatory that, according to a Barcelona statement, it ‘could incite violence’ (a lengthy process of appeal ensued at the end of which the suspension was slightly moderated from a total of four matches plus one suspended for three years to three matches plus two suspended).

  It was not the first time Mourinho had been accused of verging on incitement to violence. In Italy, too, he had frequently implied bias by referees, being fined in his first season for alleging that Juventus had benefited from decisions and both fined and banned for one match early in his second season for vehement protests during an Inter match at Cagliari. Four months later came a rant, after a 2–0 derby victory over Milan at San Siro, that was almost of Bernabéu proportions, and similar in character: ‘Everything was done today to try to prevent Inter from winning, but my squad is strong and we will win the scudetto. But I will leave it at that. This is your country and your league. I am just a foreigner working here. One day, I will go and leave the problem with you. I think we all understand that it was no coincidence that the referee [Gianluca Rocchi] showed the red card to [Wesley] Sneijder.’ Inter had been leading 1–0 in the first half when Lucio was shown the yellow card for diving. Sneijder approached Rocchi and applauded sarcastically until the referee understandably flourished the red. Near the end Lucio was also sent off and Mourinho observed: ‘I have realised that they are not going to let us wrap this title up.’

  ‘They’ were also invoked when he talked of a decision in Juventus’s favour: ‘I know there is only one team [in Italy] with a penalty area 25 metres long.’ Less amusing was his handcuff gesture – he crossed his wrists – and abuse of match officials after Walter Samuel and Ivan Cordoba were dismissed in a scoreless draw at Sampdoria. This, only a month after the San Siro rant, was going too far. There were hints of a strike by referees if he was not dealt with properly and the first reference to the potential gravity of the offence was made by a prominent figure in the game, Adriano Galliani, the Milan general manager, remarking: ‘The attitudes of some coaches are tantamount to an incitement to violence.’ Mourinho was handed his heaviest fine thus far – 40,000 euros – and a three-match ban and from there, to general relief, the storms of winter gave way to Inter’s glorious spring.

  Mourinho in, Valdano out

  On 31 May 2010, just over a week after his tearful farewell to the Inter players with whom he had won his second Champions League, Mourinho was duly presented to the media as Real Madrid’s new manager, in succession to Manuel Pellegrini. He was the eleventh in seven years but had the security of a four-year contract. Just in case anyone imagined that he might have been mellowed by the happy ending to his Italian sojourn, he said: ‘I am José Mourinho and I don’t change. I come with all my qualities and my defects.’ And he proved as good as his word.

  Not that the ousting of Jorge Valdano was necessarily evidence of a defect: the conflict between them was inevitable, if only on philosophical grounds. Valdano, a stylist under whom Real had won the Spanish title in 1995, was at the club when Mourinho arrived, working directly with the president, Florentino Pérez, as director-general and his distaste for the pragmatist Pérez had appointed surfaced after the 5–0 defeat at Barcelona in late November. Valdano noted that Mourinho had hardly left the bench during Real’s humiliation by the dancing feet of a great side and remarked upon his ‘inability to bring a major correction to the game’. Six months later, Valdano was gone and Mourinho perceived as all-powerful, with even Pérez singing from his hymn sheet in a way Roman Abramovich never did at Chelsea.

  The strains in the relationship with Valdano were felt soon after Mourinho had arrived. Valdano made no secret that he had rejected Mourinho’s request for a third striker to cover for Gonzalo Higuaín, whose fitness was in doubt. Mourinho also failed to enforce the sale of Kaká, a long-term casualty. So most of the signings for the new season were modestly priced. Mesut Özil, a star for Germany in the World Cup, cost a bargain 15 million euros, his national-team colleague Sami Khedira came for 13 million and Ricardo Carvalho, Mourinho’s old faithful from Porto and Chelsea, just 8 million. The big buy was Angel di Maria, the young Argentine winger: the fee Benfica received for him would start at 25 million and probably rise to 36 as bonus clauses were activated over time.

  The Liga season began with a goalless draw at Mallorca but Mourinho’s Real soon got into their stride, sixteen goals coming in a trio of wins over Deportivo La Coruña, Malaga and Racing Santander. Cristiano Ronaldo was scoring regularly, jockeying for supremacy in the charts with Lionel Messi in a fascinating sub-plot to the rivalry between Real and Barcelona. The Catalans were always favourites to retain their title, however, especially after their mast
erclass in the first Clasico, a performance which prompted Wayne Rooney’s cheerful revelation that, while watching it on television in his house near Manchester, he had found himself involuntarily rising to applaud Barcelona’s gorgeous passing and movement and his wife Coleen coming in to discover what the fuss was about.

  Valdano would have watched it with mixed feelings. He loved the football of the gods. In fact he played with one, being perhaps the best known of Diego Maradona’s team-mates when Argentina won the World Cup in 1986, the scorer of an equaliser from the great man’s pass before Maradona also played in Jorge Burruchaga for the goal that beat West Germany 3–2 in Mexico City. Valdano was a Real Madrid player at that time. After retiring in 1988, he combined media work with coaching the club’s youngsters and, after being appointed manager at Tenerife, whom he guided into the UEFA Cup, he was called back to take over at Real. He later became sporting director in Peréz’s first spell as president and, when Peréz was re-elected in 2009, returned as director-general and aide to Peréz. Almost as soon as Mourinho came to the club, the tension was felt and at one stage it looked as if Mourinho might be the one to lose out. Real’s image suffered when he was sent to the stands by the referee of a cup match at Murcia and there were frequent exchanges with managers of other clubs, who often accused him of lacking the class associated, rightly or wrongly, with the original aristocrats of the European game.

  Manolo Preciado, of Sporting Gijon, was one who took offence, describing Mourinho as a canalla, which roughly translates as ‘low-life’, for saying that his team had eased up in a match at Barcelona and asking: ‘Who the hell does he think he is, saying we give up? He’s a very bad colleague, an out-of-control egomaniac. If nobody at Real Madrid is going to tell him what respect means, I will. I’d like to put him up in the stands for the evening with our Ultra Boys.’ Real proceeded to win 1–0 at Gijon (though Preciado and the Ultras were to enjoy record-breaking revenge in the return fixture at the Bernabéu some months later). As for Unai Emery, the Valencia manager, he responded to a Mourinho jibe that he appeared ‘fragile’ by saying: ‘You can be very good at your job, but you should have some human values and observe them with your rivals [he mentioned Pep Guardiola in this context, along with Sir Alex Ferguson]. Then you have this guy [Mourinho] – inaccessible, disrespectful and without a minimum sense of dignity. It’s to do with wanting to be the centre of attention. Is it deliberate? I don’t know. In Spain there are a lot of coaches with no power, up against the ropes, and then this one arrives, with everything at his disposal. So, please, let’s have a bit of respect for those who are not in such strong positions.’

  Even sections of the press generally favourable to Real Madrid emitted reservations about Mourinho’s personality, the Marca columnist Roberto Palomar writing: ‘It’s curious to see how Mourinho adapts the concept of “success” to whatever suits him. When it’s in his interest, he unpacks his impressive list of trophies and parades them in the faces of all and sundry … But, when the threat of failure is upon him, suddenly “success” become something relative, transient, overvalued, ethereal and mystical. So, when he’s asked what would happen if Real Madrid were to lose in all three competitions this season to Barcelona, a question which makes a lot of sense after the 5–0 defeat, he prefers to turn arrogant and says it doesn’t matter.’

  There was trouble on the European front when it was found that Mourinho had encouraged Xabi Alonso and Sergio Ramos to collect second yellow cards, and thus one-match suspensions, in a Champions League group match once the lead over Ajax had reached 4–0 and qualification secured; they would be ruled out of the final group match against Auxerre but free again for the knockout stages. A one-match ban on Mourinho was imposed by UEFA while Real were licking the wounds Barcelona had inflicted on their pride at Camp Nou (although the threat of his missing another match if he transgressed again was later lifted on appeal). Mourinho moaned a lot, and claimed for many months that he was the only coach who had ever been disciplined for a common ploy, but he got through the winter without further traumas and the first sounds of spring could hardly have been more encouraging for him in that they came from Peréz and signified his behind-the-scenes victory over Valdano.

  The president fulsomely backed Mourinho, praising him for standing up for Real’s interests and pointedly adding that there was nothing ‘ungentlemanly’ about that. Henceforth Valdano became a marginal figure until his departure at the end of the season. Transfer policy, it was made clear, would be overseen by Peréz and his most recently appointed aide, the retired Bernabéu legend Zinedine Zidane, but with Mourinho alone making the recommendations. Politically, it was the Mourinho spring. Even if an extraordinary personal sequence of home results – not a single league defeat in 150 matches at Porto, Chelsea, Inter and Real since Beira Mar had come to the Dragão and won 3–2 in February 2002 – was brought to an end by Manolo Preciado’s Sporting Gijon in early April.

  His team returned to domestic form with a 3–0 victory over Athletic in Bilbao, after which, upon hearing that Barcelona had fallen behind to lowly Almeria, there was briefly hope that the deficit would be cut to five points in advance of the return Clasico at the Bernabéu. Barcelona hit back to win 3–1. But Mourinho’s main focus was on the Champions League now. Real had thrashed Tottenham Hotspur 4–0, with the aid of Peter Crouch’s early dismissal, in the first leg of their quarter-final and, with a semi against Barcelona as well as the Liga collision in mind, Mourinho began resting key players such as Cristiano Ronaldo, Mesut Özil and Xabi Alonso.

  Continuing tension with the press, as exemplified by the journalists’ walkout before the Liga match with Barcelona at the Bernabéu when they were confronted not by Mourinho but his assistant Karanka, a retired Real player who had featured in the successful Champions League campaign of 1999–2000, was put to good use. It helped Mourinho to build his customary stockade mentality among the squad. Even their ‘friends’ in the press, he told them, had not shown Karanka the respect due a member of the indivisible unit of which they were members.

  The great Alfredo di Stefano, Real’s honorary president, delivered a gloomy verdict on the 1–1 draw at the Bernabéu – ‘Barcelona were a lion, Madrid a mouse’ – but the mouse was about to roar as Real took the Copa del Rey, ultimately in style, Angel di Maria crossing so superbly in the 103rd minute that he twitched with anticipatory excitement even as the ball curled towards Ronaldo, whose rocket of a far-post header left Victor Valdes helpless. Di Maria’s subsequent departure after a second yellow card was of limited relevance. This meant that Mourinho’s great rival Guardiola had failed to win three of the trophies available to Barcelona over his three seasons to date – and that Mourinho, first with Inter in the Champions League, had denied him two of them. Afterwards, Mourinho said: ‘I am happy that our work is paying off.’ And later, asked how he had repaired his team after the 5–0 defeat, he replied: ‘What I’ve said to my players is simply – and these are not my words but the words of Albert Einstein – that the only force that is more powerful than steam, electricity or atomic energy is the human will. And that guy Albert is not stupid.’

  This was on the eve of the Champions League first leg, amid all the taunts that so irked Guardiola. But the human will, it turned out, also drove Barcelona.

  Yet, even as the wider world ridiculed Mourinho’s paranoid reaction – ‘He seems to get worse every year,’ said the Sky Italia commentator Massimo Marianella – and UEFA prepared to exert discipline, it became clear that he had not entirely lost the battle for Madrid’s hearts and minds. In London, The Times sought a pro-Mourinho view from the Spanish capital and Jesus Alcaide, a columnist for El Mundo, was only too enthusiastic. He began with sarcasm – ‘it is very possible that in the next few days José Mourinho will be accused of war crimes and have to appear before the International Court at The Hague’ – and concluded: ‘Madrid is with Mourinho and will defend him to the death in front of UEFA and in front of anyone. The Portuguese’s words have struck a
chord because he works and he lives for the club. The feelings are mutual. It will be long-lasting.’ Alcaide also warned Manchester United to prepare to play ten versus eleven in the final at Wembley, because they would surely have someone sent off against Barcelona. In fact the Wembley event turned out to be an extremely sporting encounter, after which Sir Alex Ferguson generously praised Barcelona and said there was no shame in his players losing 3–1 to such an exceptionally fine team. The contrast was telling.

  At least Ferguson’s season ended at the highest level. Mourinho’s petered out after the 1–1 draw in second leg of the semi-final with the boss absent and Karanka echoing his master’s voice in a valedictory complaint about a refereeing decision. The Times, as if slightly ashamed of having given space to the devil’s advocate Alcaide, left us with a brilliant piece by its chief sports writer, Simon Barnes, who declared that Mourinho’s rant had made it plain that he was not, after all, a lovable eccentric or a maverick genius but ‘just the loony on the Tube: change carriage at Aldgate East because he’s going all the way to Barking’. Mourinho had the great talent possessed by quite a few egomaniacs, wrote the perceptive Barnes: that of enforcing on others the duty to gratify his whims. But now was the time to stop listening to him and slip away ‘because the next time you meet he’ll tell you he’s Napoleon’.

  That might have been how many in England had come to see it, and in Italy and the rest of Europe. In Manchester, not least. His next port of call, after Madrid, was widely expected to be Manchester, where City were now funded by one of the richest men in the world, Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Sultan Al Nahyan, but where Mourinho’s own inclination had long been to take the place of his friend Sir Alex Ferguson at United. Would United have wanted a man who screamed red murder in adversity – or who set up a team so defensively, so cynically, at home in a Champions League semi-final? The feeling among supporters about Mourinho had always been ambivalent; this tended to confirm the instincts of the sceptical faction and David Gill, as much as anyone connected with the club, would have been aware of it. Not that the item was at the top of United’s agenda; in the wake of the Champions League final defeat by Barcelona, the word from the club was that Ferguson, seven months short of his seventieth birthday but in apparently excellent health, had indicated a wish to stay for another three years. So Mourinho’s stock had fallen on the international market. But Madrid was still with him because, although Guardiola had the Spanish and European titles for the moment, Mourinho retained the anatomy of a winner.