Quietly, as the rest of the world hailed Barcelona’s magnificent 3–1 victory over United at Wembley – at times the performance had reached the heights of the season’s first Clasico – Mourinho continued assembling his squad for the new campaign. The Turkish/German influence already evident through Ozil and Khedira, who represented Germany despite their families’ origins, was enhanced by the securing of two members of Turkey’s midfield: Nuri Sahin from Borussia Dortmund, who cost 10 million euros but was to be swiftly blighted by injury, and Hamit Altintop on a free transfer from Bayern Munich. José Maria Callejón came from Espanyol for 5.5 million. Then the capture of a coveted French teenager, the tall defender Raphael Varane (10 million from Lens), was followed by the most expensive arrival of the summer to date, the left-sided Portuguese full-back or midfielder Fabio Coentrao (30 million from Benfica). The buys from a year earlier came while Mourinho was getting his feet under the table.
These now, were definitely his.
The departure of Valdano had left no doubt that Mourinho would be both architect and builder of the 2011–12 season at Real. His last in Madrid? We would have to wait and see but, according to the English referee who had become perhaps his most surprising friend – he got close to Mark Halsey after the Englishman had treatment for cancer – it was only a matter of time before Mourinho returned to the Premier League. ‘Oh, he’ll come back,’ said Halsey as the controversy raged over the Bernabéu allegations. ‘He’s got his life all mapped out. And let’s just hope it’s sooner rather than later, because the Premier League is missing him. Chelsea have definitely gone backwards without him.’ Halsey’s admiration for Mourinho was understandable: when Mourinho was at both Inter and Real, he invited the Halsey family to be his guests at matches and the referee conceded: ‘If he came back here while I was still on the senior list, I wouldn’t be allowed to ref his team.’ But much of what Halsey said about Mourinho’s personal qualities helped to explain why players swear such fierce allegiance to him; Xabi Alonso, for instance, declaring: ‘From an emotional point of view, he is very strong. He makes each player the best he can be. He knows how to connect with us.’
Halsey said: ‘I’ve been fortunate enough to be taken round Madrid’s training ground by him twice, and you can see that the players have so much respect for him. He has the players eating out of his hand. The way he manages people is fantastic. A lot of people, in every walk of life, could learn from José Mourinho about how to manage people by treating them properly and looking after them. Unfortunately many managers, not just in football but in other spheres, come nowhere near his standard. He’s been an absolute inspiration to me and my family. I suppose that, for someone like myself who’s grown up and gone through life without a father [Halsey’s father left his mother when he was a toddler and they did not meet again until Halsey was in his thirties], the sort of man you would want would be José Mourinho. Well, I would, anyway. If I could choose a father, he would be the man.’
Which takes us back to the year after they met. The year in which Mourinho brought his children to England.
PART TWO
Welcome to England
He does what it says on the tin
It was near the end of 2004, the year in which English football had encountered its most startling new manager since the first flush of Brian Clough.
As Christmas approached and the people on London’s streets retained, for just a few more days, a blissful ignorance of the word ‘tsunami’, a couple living in one of the more prosperous and fashionable districts of the capital decided to take their two children ice-skating. Each year a rink was created in a little square of shops just off the King’s Road and, while it might cross a certain kind of mind to observe that the happy-family atmosphere engendered must be good for business, even such a cynic would find the remark freezing on pursed lips. For pre-Christmas crowds have a refreshing lightness of heart. Nuts and oranges may have given way to technological toys as the tokens of seasonal generosity, but the traditional spirit survives and, liberated by it, people reacquaint themselves with their best instincts in smiling at strangers or apologising when they might otherwise grimace. And our couple, to whom the experience of a Christmas in London was new, were obviously enjoying a rare afternoon as a family.
Each holding a child by the hand, they moved through the shoppers to the edge of the ice, where the girl and boy – she about nine years of age, he about five – were helped to put on their skates. Even muffled against the cold, the father attracted a few glances of recognition, but famous people, footballers among them, have often said that one of the benefits of coming to London is that they are not harried in the street and can live a relatively normal life (at least as normal as most of them would wish it to be), and this respect was accorded our man. One admirer took a photograph from such a distance that the subject would not have noticed. The only person who approached José Mourinho was a Portuguese football writer resident in London who knew him slightly and who, having wished him and his family a happy Christmas, withdrew to attend to his own wife and small son.
Mourinho leant back on a wall to watch as the boy and girl skated off, she confidently and he less so. Mourinho would check on them and, usually, upon returning to his wife’s side, he would kiss her. He frequently called to the children, encouraging them and, with signals, offering suggestions on how they could improve their technique. From time to time, like most of the other children, they fell and on one occasion the boy had difficulty in rising from the ice. Immediately Mourinho was with him, offering not a helping hand but a demonstration of the best method of getting up. He waited while the boy followed his advice, smiling patiently. And off the boy went again, with more assurance. Anyone who saw the incident would have formed the impression that Mourinho was a sensitive father. Which in turn provided a hint as to why he had made such an impact on football.
For at the highest level of management these days – and henceforth we shall fall into line with most of the world and refer to Mourinho’s field as coaching – sensitivity rules. And, for all the peevishness that was to get him into trouble with both authority and the media, Mourinho takes care of his players.
‘I like the look of Mourinho,’ Clough had said shortly before he died. ‘There’s a bit of the young Clough about him. For a start, he’s good-looking …’ Which indeed Clough had been in his early days at Derby County, before the booze began to blur his sharp features and mottle his complexion. But times have changed and you cannot boss a player around as easily as Clough might have done, or use the discipline of estrangement from his peers by sending a star to train with the youth team, as Clough once did. Most coaches have to accept that Sir Alex Ferguson, who could lash out at a stray boot and send it flying through the dressing-room air, drawing blood from one of David Beckham’s expertly plucked eyebrows – and proceed, with total impunity, to sell the then England captain to Real Madrid – represented the end of the line. One by one, culminating in the European Court case won by Jean-Marc Bosman in December 1995 that allowed players to move freely at the end of their contracts without their new employers having to pay a transfer fee, the constraints have been stripped away.
To claim that Ferguson and his predecessors – the likes of Sir Matt Busby at Manchester United, Bill Shankly and Bob Paisley at Liverpool, Don Revie at Leeds United, Bill Nicholson at Tottenham Hotspur and even Clough at Derby and Nottingham Forest – were mere martinets would be as misleading as to imply that Mourinho and Arsène Wenger, outstanding exponents of the modern style of coaching in England, have been indulgent softies. It would also do an injustice to the multi-dimensional nature of the job. Aime Jacquet, who coached France to victory in the World Cup in 1998, touched on this when he said: ‘Today children are more curious and bolder. That is why we have to prepare coaches not just to teach youngsters about what happens on the pitch but about psychology, physiology, drugs, doping and social education. The coach of the future will have to be at different times a teacher, a buddy,
a father, a friend, etc. It will not be enough for him simply to impose authority. He will need above all the ability to listen and pass on a message. He must be credible and able to defend his values.’
You may think those words a reasonable description of the role of today’s youth coach, not applicable to those charged with guiding the aristocrats of modern football who earn their livings with Mourinho at clubs with the lavish budgets of Chelsea, Internazionale or Real Madrid. Until you remember that during his first few months at Stamford Bridge he had to deal with the distraction created by the Romanian attacker Adrian Mutu’s cocaine problem. Eventually, Mourinho ran out of patience. Mutu was tested by the club, sacked, named and shamed and, after a spell in limbo, went back to Italy, where he joined Juventus. The message was clear: cross Mourinho, abuse the friendship of this buddy, and the only way was out (and an expensive direction it proved in Mutu’s case, for Chelsea pursued a claim for damages and he was ordered to pay £15 million).
The modern coach must strike a balance between strength and sensitivity. Mourinho contrives to be both things to all men. That is part of the reason he is – to use his own word – special. Should he have said it? Should he have breezed into England and inspired a classic Sun headline – ‘The Ego Has Landed’ – by telling the press that Chelsea could be champions because they had terrific players and a ‘special one’ as coach? His own justification, outlined at the end of the season in a BBC television interview with Gary Lineker, was that he had suddenly found himself in a strange environment being showered with questions by people who seemed to be hankering for his credentials. Anyway, it was a statement of fact that he offered them rather than a grandiloquent aspiration; there are not many coaches who have won the UEFA Cup and Champions League in their first two full seasons with a club, sweeping up a couple of national championships and a domestic cup along the way, but that is what Mourinho had done with Porto in his native land.
Some eighteen months later, when he had encountered the fall from grace examined later in this book – Mourinho’s moaning after a defeat by Barcelona in the Champions League at Stamford Bridge led Hugh McIlvanney in the Sunday Times to dub him the Specious One – he was to leave himself wide open to such mockery. But in the early summer of 2004 his image was untouchable.
In the stadium in Gelsenkirchen, Germany, where the Champions League final was won by Porto, he had spoken of his need for a fresh challenge. He had spoken with ambition and, overwhelmingly, of himself, and perhaps it was because of this that I, along with other journalists in England, got off on the wrong foot. It was not that his achievements could be belittled, more that the history of football was strewn with instances of success through chemistry – Arrigo Sacchi developed the formula for a great Milan, but nothing as explosive afterwards – and it looked as if this Mourinho chap was sorely tempting fate. The press were not alone in wondering if his pride came before a fall. The coaches waiting to pit their wits against him in the Premier League felt it too. One of the brightest, David Moyes, who was also to enjoy an outstanding season as Everton qualified for the Champions League by finishing fourth, recalled relishing the prospect of Mourinho’s comeuppance. ‘The initial feeling,’ Moyes told me some months later, with a smile and a sigh, ‘was that you just couldn’t display that kind of arrogance in this country and get away with it. I think there were a few queueing up, you know, waiting to have a crack at him.’
We the professional bystanders did not hesitate to have fun with him. Such was his self-absorption (I wrote) that he would fit perfectly into contemporary London. I imagined him cutting a swathe through the traffic in a massive black 4×4 with smoked windows which, having stopped and carefully straddled two parking bays in order to reduce the risk of scratches from other vehicles, would disgorge the smooth operator, suit miraculously uncreased and mobile-phone cord dangling from one ear as details of the next day’s training were laid down to a distant underling.
Well, I didn’t know he was kind and attentive to his children, did I? I didn’t know he would nuzzle his wife by the ice-rink wall when no one was looking. I didn’t know the country would take such a liking to Mourinho that, by the Christmas of 2004, it could be asserted that he was the most admired football personality of the day among neutrals and followers of his own club alike: a position that had fallen vacant because Newcastle United had seen fit to part company with Sir Bobby Robson, Mourinho’s old boss and guide.
Far from tempting fate with his high self-esteem, Mourinho had taken fate in his hands and, as in Portugal, shaped it. I think that is the main reason we warmed to him: to borrow the brilliant simplicity of television commercials for Ronseal, a range of products including varnish and woodstain, he did what it said on the tin. In England we had become used to a culture of inefficiency or, to use the expression favoured by football folk, sloppiness. When a train turned up on time, we were pathetically grateful. When we arrived home with a bag of oranges, tore the netting apart and found every single one to be rot-free, we almost burst into tears of joyous relief. Things went wrong, sometimes horribly wrong. Hideously wrong. At the time of Mourinho’s arrival, anyone who emerged from a public hospital no worse than when he or she went in was assumed to have supernatural powers. Nor was this the only cause for public dismay. A war was conducted on the basis of ‘intelligence’ used without due care and attention. Small wonder that, in the build-up to the general election of May 2005, the key issue was to be identified as not health or education or security so much as the ability of any of the parties to deliver any promise at all. So little could be taken on trust. For many people, life in England had become a matter of hoping for the best.
Even in football, an activity rare in that it still inspired unrealistically high expectations, the customers’ charter could not be relied upon to guarantee same-day delivery: why, the poor dears who supported Manchester United and Arsenal, the clubs who had established a clear superiority over all others since the Premier League was formed in 1992 (or the top division of the old Football League hived off and rebranded, as some of us might insist), had been obliged to share the intoxicating nectar of supremacy with each other. It was the beginning of a particularly cruel era in football. The language of the phone-in, later to be taken further downmarket by the internet chatroom, had become prevalent. Coaches of clubs from Tyneside to the south coast lost a couple of matches in succession and were decried for having lost much more than that; they had lost ‘the plot’. In front of packed houses, the majority of teams ‘underachieved’. Leeds United and others ran up vast debts ‘chasing the dream’, egged on by fans who, when the dream turned out to be a financial nightmare, immediately accused the directors of reckless extravagance.
Chelsea were among those who lived beyond their means in the early years of the twenty-first century. Until a small proportion of the riches Roman Abramovich had made – through Boris Yeltsin’s shameful car-boot sale of the Russian people’s oil and gas, let us never forget – was applied to an eminently unworthy cause, the saving of a football club’s skin. The saving, moreover, of a club that had reached the verge of ruin under Ken Bates. To give Bates his due, that was the condition in which he had found Chelsea in the first place, and he left it much more robust than had been the case a quarter of a century earlier, when he was able to buy it for £1. But the advent of Abramovich still rendered Bates the luckiest man in football and, having taken the near £20 million the Russian gave him for his shares and tried to settle in Monte Carlo, he soon got bored and returned to England to apply his unique abilities to the erstwhile dream-chasers of Leeds.
Chelsea were, on the face of it, even luckier. They had been plucked from the jaws of bankruptcy and turned overnight into the world’s most financially muscular club (a title they retained until Manchester City were bought by the fabulously rich Sheikh Mansour of Abu Dhabi). While Claudio Ranieri stayed as coach for one more year, clinging to his dignity with one hand and a negotiating position with the other, Peter Kenyon, the chief executive
Abramovich had lured from Manchester United, courted the England coach, starting at what we can only presume he mistook – rather in the manner of an inexperienced mountaineer – for the peak of the profession. It was just a ridge. Kenyon, too, had a stroke of luck then for, when Sven-Göran Eriksson went to see him in his London flat, a newspaper photographer’s prying lens was trained on the semi-transparent curtains. Once Kenyon and Eriksson had been caught together, the Football Association had a clear duty. Or so many of us thought. But, instead of indicating to the country that they could hardly afford to stand in the Swede’s way, they gave Eriksson a cuddle and pay rise and Kenyon had to look elsewhere.
He now looked in the obvious place: the Champions League, where the 41-year-old Mourinho and the even younger Didier Deschamps, whose Monaco were to knock Chelsea out of the competition in the semi-final, were working their wonders on limited resources. He went for Mourinho, who, from then on, began working his wonders on unlimited resources. First Mourinho talked a good game. Then his Chelsea team played one. His implicit promise of the earth was about to be delivered. Just as it had been at Porto. He was doing what it said on the tin marked ‘special’.
Mourinho: Further Anatomy of a Winner Page 3
