Mourinho: Further Anatomy of a Winner

by Patrick Barclay

  The Frisk affair was more significant in any language, and although, as Chelsea went into the last month of the season, Mourinho admitted he had made mistakes – ‘it is not necessary to fight every day’ – he continued to betray no hint of sympathy for the referee. He even made a joke about Frisk on Portuguese television that verged on the callous. Asked to comment on Porto’s 2–0 defeat by Sporting Lisbon, during which his former club had had two players sent off, Mourinho smiled and replied: ‘I have to be very careful when I talk about referees because Mr Joao Ferreira may also quit refereeing.’ Clearly Frisk’s retirement was not weighing too heavily on his conscience.

  It was, then, very much in a spirit of defiance that Mourinho approached the visit of Bayern to Stamford Bridge. He even took the opportunity to play mind games with his own employers and Chelsea’s first weekend of April, though it included a victory at Southampton, was utterly dominated by reports of how Kenyon and, of course, Abramovich had been made aware that he was (a) not very happy with the standard of support the club had given him during the rows with UEFA, who had themselves privately complained about the attitude of at least one Chelsea employee involved, and (b) not wholly against the notion of a contract extension on highly favourable terms. The contract question had been under discussion for some time but Mourinho’s standing had become so high that he had only to cough for everyone at Chelsea to catch a cold – everyone, but everyone, at that time – and so at Peter Kenyon’s suggestion Abramovich flew in to meet Mourinho and his agent, Jorge Mendes. Suddenly all was sweetness and light and the only argument to be heard was between journalists on the question of how much Mourinho’s next contract would be worth. A basic £5.2 million a year – a rise of £1 million, presumably – was the lowest estimate. The highest was £9 million, including bonuses and image rights.

  Mourinho watched his team beat Bayern 4–2 on television in the fitness centre of the Chelsea Village Hotel, less than a hundred yards from the pitch, and throughout the match events on the bench engaged the media almost as frequently as the excellence of Frank Lampard, who scored one very good goal and one, featuring a chest-trap, turn and half-volley, all in the same smooth movement, that was quite sumptuous, of balletic elegance. Meanwhile Rui Faria, the fitness coach, kept fiddling with the area around his right ear, inducing a suspicion that Mourinho was passing messages to his assistants by telephone, as he had boasted of doing when with Porto. Every now and again a note would be scribbled and handed to Clarke or Mourinho’s most senior assistant, Baltemar Brito. Once again Chelsea’s players were struggling for space on the back pages the next morning – against their own manager, who had not even been in the stadium. It was becoming more and more difficult to accept what he had said after Cardiff: ‘I’m not interested in my image … I’m just thinking of the group. They know me, they understand that.’

  It ought to be added, in fairness to Mourinho, that the antics of his sidekicks were clearly for the benefit of the players rather than the media. Anyway, insisted Rui Faria, when he turned up in Munich as Mourinho’s spokesman at the pre-match press conference: ‘I did not have anything under my hat last week and people worry about too many silly things.’ Just to be sure, UEFA officials went to him at half-time and ordered him to remove his hat; nothing was found. As an example of closing the stable door after the horse had bolted, this was unbeatable. Chelsea came through the match more comfortably than the 6–5 aggregate score might suggest, earning a semi-final against Liverpool which, given the mutual respect that then existed between Mourinho and his counterpart Rafael Benítez, was bound to pulsate in a vigorous but relatively civilised and adult manner.

  Liverpool’s supporters played their part. Shortly before the first leg at Stamford Bridge, a scoreless stalemate, Mourinho left his players and staff in the dressing room and strode deep in thought to the bench to sit alone, as was his custom. He may have forgotten that the area next to the bench at Chelsea is allocated to visiting fans. At any rate, he was soon approached by several Liverpudlians making ‘Shush’ gestures. Mourinho, grinning broadly, gave them the thumbs-up before posing for a mobile-phone photograph.

  The match was played in a similar spirit and at the end of a deafening second leg, decided in Liverpool’s favour by the decision of the Slovakian referee Luboš Michel to award a goal to Luis García in the opening minutes, Mourinho paid tribute to the crowd’s influence. There was a double edge to his remarks, for he went on to claim that William Gallas had cleared the ball before the whole of it had crossed the line and blamed one of Michel’s linesmen, Roman Slyško, for having signalled a goal; the official, he implied, had been swayed by the Anfield atmosphere. While a body of opinion, fortified by Sky computer images, sympathised with him on this, others pointed out that, if Michel and Slyško had been of a mind to apply the letter of the law rigorously against Chelsea, the referee could have given a penalty against Petr ech, who had bowled over Milan Baroš seconds earlier, and shown the goalkeeper the red card, leaving Mourinho’s team with ten men for almost the whole match.

  Anyway, Liverpool and their fevered supporters deserved to reach a final they were destined to win dramatically, even if Mourinho, in asserting afterwards that the better team had lost on this occasion, was unable to resist the temptation to allude to the truth as demonstrated by the Premier League table.

  Chelsea went very close to punching their weight. In the sixth and last minute of time added for stoppages, Eidur Gudjohnsen put wide the sort of chance you would expect him to take. But if Chelsea had prevailed, it would have been nothing to do with Mourinho’s powers, to which Liverpool, under the more restrained but undoubtedly crafty Benítez, seemed impervious. While spectators, their veins bulging, roared and screamed, the technical area marked out in front of the dugouts staged an oddly dignified play within a play. At one stage Benítez and Mourinho, coincidentally running out to the boundary line to signal instructions to their players, bumped into each other; each briefly smiled, half-turned inwards and raised his arms in a symmetrical gesture of apology. Towards the end of the match, Mourinho became a still, small figure who had run out of ideas and accepted tactical defeat; he had thrown on the beefy young German defender Robert Huth as an additional striker, a ploy hardly calculated to furrow the brows of Sami Hyypia and the outstanding Jamie Carragher. After the final whistle, he went to his players. There were hugs for Terry and Lampard and a special squeeze for the freshly frustrated Gudjohnsen, and then handshakes for the jubilant Liverpool side were followed by applause for the crowd from Mourinho as he disappeared down the tunnel.

  Would he now shush? A likely scenario! His complaints about Slyško were made without any reference to the decisions that had worked in his team’s favour when Porto survived at Manchester United the previous season and Chelsea triumphed over Barcelona; selective myopia is a widespread affliction among coaches. Whether he chose his words carefully only he can know, but he stopped short of inviting a UEFA charge before, for some reason, reiterating his belief in God and promising that his planning for the next season would start right away.

  The principal objective for the current season had been attained only seventy-three hours earlier – Mourinho was still complaining that the Premier League fixture schedule worked against Chelsea’s interests in Europe – when they secured the English title at Bolton, two goals from Frank Lampard causing a limited celebration. When Mourinho spotted the players taking an odd swig from the champagne bottles they had been using to spray each other, he ‘got the hump’ according to a grinning Lampard, and told them to remember Anfield. But he was as happy and fulfilled as anyone else. A few weeks earlier, Mourinho had vouchsafed: ‘I predicted at the start of the season that we would win the title in April.’ It was 30 April and Mourinho’s men were hugging each other. To quote the slogan more precisely: he had done exactly what it said on the tin.

  The work still to be done meant he could not keep a pledge to stand back once the title was safe, ‘to disappear a little bit and let the p
layers enjoy themselves and be the face of our success’. Some hope! The day after Chelsea took the title, a BBC website offering the public ‘shares’ in sports personalities priced in accordance with the newspaper column inches devoted to them – Mourinho had for some months been the most expensive – showed him at £132.04. You could have Lampard at £16.54 and Terry at £10.77. Wayne Rooney shares were the second priciest at £22.58. So the option of relative obscurity was not open to Mourinho. But, in brief deference to his promise, he was more restrained at Bolton than on other occasions and an indelible image of that warm evening at the Reebok Stadium is of him alone in the dugout with his mobile phone and the loveliest, most relaxed smile, one that exuded pure pleasure rather than the triumphalism normally evident on these occasions. When he had finished, the Sky interviewer Geoff Shreeves went over and asked who the conversation had been with and he replied: ‘My wife, my kids.’ It was difficult to believe that this was the belligerent blusterer of Barcelona, the carping curmudgeon of Cardiff, but they were all one and the same. We had before us a much more complicated character than Mourinho’s initial conquest of the English game’s affections may have suggested.

  When I asked Sir Bobby Robson if Mourinho had rubbed people up the wrong way in Portugal or Spain as he had done since coming to England, he answered: ‘No, never. Not in our time together anyway.’ So he, Robson, had never seen the strutting figure who taunted the Liverpool supporters in Cardiff? ‘No, not really.’ So what had changed him – fame? ‘Well,’ said Robson, ‘let me tell you. And it’s happened to me. It happens to all of us. We acquire a bit of power, don’t we? Through success. You get a bit of power. You know what you stand for. You know what people think of you. And this power, this control you have over people, becomes ingrained into you. You develop a stronger personality. Look at Brian Clough and the way he developed. At one time Cloughie wasn’t the Old Big ’Ead he became. He always had visions that he might get that way, probably, but he had to behave in a certain manner. All successful managers, if you look at them, have that strength of personality. You use your position to be powerful. More powerful than you basically are.’

  The notion of Mourinho as a victim of the syndrome, a managerial megalomaniac, was seductive; after all, he became accustomed to dominance at Porto, and now he had the purse of one of the world’s richest men with which to build an empire. But Robson’s great friend Gérard Houllier thought the motivation was more likely to be a desire for revenge than power. ‘I can imagine he’d had a lot of abuse at the Millennium Stadium,’ the former Liverpool coach continued, ‘because Chelsea had been 1–0 down for a long time. So he was saying to them, “You’ve had a go at me – now be quiet.” Like players do.’ But he is not a player and the difference was outlined by William Gaillard, the UEFA official who so irked Chelsea when, while accepting that Mourinho had not intended to whip up such serious malice as Anders Frisk was made to suffer, he said: ‘Coaches are role models for players and fans. They have a duty to behave better than anyone else.’ Was that not the case? Houllier nodded. So had Mourinho not gone too far in Barcelona? ‘Yes, but it’s easy to say that sitting in a comfortable chair in a quiet room when there’s no crowd in your ears and things going on. In our job, we sometimes get a bit paranoid.’

  Quite so. And when I told Houllier what I have seen it do to the most civilised and intelligent of them – notably induce the emission of utter twaddle, especially on the subject of referees – he gave a chuckle of recognition. ‘I know – even Arsène!’ Neither Wenger nor Houllier has been known to tell a crowd to shut up. But Wenger on occasion has defended the indefensible and Houllier seethed against referees. ‘I think,’ said Houllier, ‘that, when things don’t go your way, you are trying to rationalise, to find an explanation, and sometimes that leads you down the wrong road. Now I have gone back into management I hope I’ll be different, because I’ve been on the other side, working for French television, and can see the futility of how we sometimes behave. It’s incredible. I never saw it before. I can see now that even José Mourinho gives too much importance to certain things. But in his place, a few years ago, I’d have felt no differently. And what we have to remember is that, despite the brilliance of José’s career, he is still in the early stages of it.’ Houllier then offered the following hostage to fortune: ‘the more he wins the more humble he will get. He is a rough diamond who will gradually become smoother and better, both as a coach and as a man.’

  It did seem to happen with Houllier. When he spoke about Mourinho, he was back in France, with Olympique Lyonnais. He went on to resume work with the national federation before returning to England to join Aston Villa in 2010. There, Houllier did seem a lighter, calmer man. And Mourinho? We waited to see. It had happened to Brian Clough, who, though alcoholism began to sap his strength when he was not much older than Mourinho when he joined Chelsea, became one of the most principled of managers; when Clough died, past referees lined up to form a metaphorical guard of honour, for his teams had been models of discipline. Whether Mourinho will ever bring to his manipulative skills such an unashamedly moral dimension remains to be judged.

  Yet during a break in Chelsea’s 2004–05 season there was evidence that he valued things other than the pursuit of victory. At the end of March, when his players dispersed to join their various national squads for World Cup qualifying matches, Mourinho flew to Israel. He had been approached two months earlier by the Peres Center for Peace and asked for help in drawing worldwide attention to a programme designed to foster peace by bringing together Israeli and Palestinian children to play football in mixed teams. Mourinho readily agreed and the commitment he displayed during a three-day visit impressed every observer. With Shimon Peres, the deputy prime minister, he mingled with countless children and one day he gave a lecture to around 250 Israeli and Palestinian coaches, complete with visual projections he had clearly taken the trouble to prepare himself, drawing on experience; Mourinho was a teacher for three years before he went into football full-time. The odd instance of semantic originality – ‘improvisibility’ was one concept that lost something in translation – only added to the charm. Even hard-to-impress journalists were enthralled. ‘When it was over,’ one told me, ‘I looked at my watch and he’d been speaking for an hour and thirty-five minutes. The time had flashed by.’

  Another writer who went on the trip, Matt Hughes, then of the London Evening Standard, wrote that, when Mourinho stood back in his white T-shirt to address an enlarged photograph of himself and Frank Lampard locked in an embrace after the Carling Cup final, he went all sensitive, as if sharing his wedding pictures with the audience. ‘This,’ Mourinho told the coaches, ‘looks like a hug, but it’s more than a hug … this is a hug that shows we trust each other. Without words he’s saying to me “Thanks” and I’m saying to him “Thanks”. This is a hug that we repeat player after player because we are a family.’

  Upon reading that, I thought about Adrian Mutu, the player thrown out of the Chelsea family for taking cocaine. Then I reflected that there can be a limit to any parent’s patience. It is natural, sometimes, when you listen to the puffed-up figures of a coach’s speech, to think: bullshit. But Mutu, like every player on the Chelsea staff at the start of the 2004–05 season, was told Mourinho wanted only players willing to gear everything, including their social lives, to the demands of success. The Romanian broke his implicit promise and, after ignoring warnings, had to be punished for it. But at the end of every moral discussion surrounding Mourinho you came back to the same question: what had the family of Anders Frisk done to offend him? Football, for all the light it might occasionally bring into the lives of the children of the Gaza Strip, can be a nasty business.

  Mourinho, according to Chelsea’s bête noire, William Gaillard of UEFA, had brought ‘a lot of new things to football, many of them positive’, but he had to remember he was in a position of responsibility. The trouble with being a top-level coach, however, is that it involves such a lot of acting. And how c
an a man be sure what his position is when briefly – in the interests of the team, of course – he has forgotten who he is. Coaches are often ham actors, playing to the gallery or the media, sometimes with a different act for each. José Mourinho was unusual; he was like a one-man show in which he played a wide variety of roles. He could do a passable megalomaniac, or be paranoid. He could strut in full of bombast, nakedly adversarial, ready to take on the world. Or he could be vulnerable; often, when he was in this frame of mind, a shark metaphor was just around the corner (understandably enough, given that he was brought up so near the Portuguese coast). At the height of his conflict with UEFA and Barcelona, he mused: ‘I feel like a boy swimming between sharks.’ When there was a lull, you came to expect a storm, and the other way round. And yet he always seemed to surprise us, to hold our attention and keep us guessing, just as those of a certain age could remember Clough being able to. There had been articles in the broadsheets discussing the connection between madness and genius (or at least eccentricity and being an outstanding football manager) which you could well have imagined adorning the colour supplements in Clough’s day. Clough liked to swing from mood to mood. He would portray himself as a dictator one day, a caring socialist the next – in 1973 he was described by Malcolm Allison, another of the more flamboyant managers, as ‘a kind of Rolls-Royce communist’.