Mourinho informed them they were unbeatable and should never forget it, because successful teams had no fear of losing. The allure of such meaningless statements, usually purloined from the writings of American sports coaches, escapes many outsiders, but it is rarely lost on players. Chelsea’s were told that Porto had been fearless and that, given Porto’s achievements, was good enough for them. When the Champions League pitted them against Barcelona, said Terry: ‘Initially you think “great side”, which they are, but when you’ve got a manager drumming it into you every day that you are the best, that there isn’t going to be anybody better, it rubs off on the players and we go out there believing it.’ Lampard added that Mourinho had the knack of being able to transmit his ‘amazing confidence’ to every player.
He has an almost quaint liking for pen and paper. Everything he has done in his coaching career, from day one with the youths at Vitória Setúbal, has been written in notebooks and retained. This is not unique. Everton’s David Moyes told me: ‘I’ve written down what every coach I’ve ever worked with has done – with my own ideas alongside, such as “I wouldn’t have put the centre-half in here” or whatever. Even now, my assistant [Alan Irvine at the time] writes down everything we do at Everton – I could tell you what our training routines were three years ago last Thursday! But José, as I say, somehow manages to make it sound sexy.’
His habit of getting substitutes to carry on written messages to other players fascinated Portuguese viewers; the cameras would zoom in to try to sneak a look. He continued the habit in England and, after Jií Jarošík had carried on written instructions for Tiago at Everton, the referees’ overseer, Keith Hackett, was asked if regulations allowed it. ‘Yes,’ said an amused Hackett. ‘There is nothing in the laws to prevent it. It might be different if the substitute took a Christmas hamper on to the pitch.’ As always with Mourinho, however, these billets-doux have a serious purpose. Asked about the illustrated tutorial Dmitri Alenitchev was given before taking the field in Porto’s Champions League final, Roxburgh said: ‘José’s clever enough to know which players can absorb words and which need to be shown things visually.’
To call him a hands-on coach would be understating it. While serving one of his dugout bans in Portugal, where a suspended coach is allowed to speak to his players at half-time, he was stopped on a landing by a security guard at the stadium of Porto’s local rivals, Boavista, but simply picked up his mobile phone; the players heard his reassuring voice on a speaker-phone one of his assistants had taken the precaution of carrying into the dressing room. When he was banned from the second leg of the UEFA Cup semi-final against Lazio in Rome, he texted messages to the bench. One translates as ‘Tell Deco I’m pissed off – I want more’, another as ‘Pressure on linesman, everybody’. While the latter confirms Mourinho is a psychological warrior, it is almost standard coaching practice to order your players to chip away at match officials in the hope of obtaining a marginal decision sooner or later. What set him somewhat apart was his foray from the dugout physically to prevent the Lazio player Lucas Castromán from taking a quick throw in the UEFA Cup semi-final first leg (which Porto won 4–1). For that he incurred the suspension in Rome (there the match ended 0–0) and Roxburgh, recalling how hard it hit him, could not quite suppress a laugh. ‘José came to one of our UEFA meetings some time later and it clearly still rankled. Not the red card. “I deserved that,” he said. “The referee was absolutely right. I had no excuse for what I did.” Because one thing all these guys are is brutally honest with themselves. But José went on to say it was an absolute disgrace that, as well as denying him a seat in the dugout, they would not let him in the dressing room at half-time. He was raging about it. A lot of the others – Fergie and Wenger and people like that – were listening and some were nodding and thinking maybe he had a point. And naturally coaches are going to think that. So I took it up with UEFA. But they think a banned coach should be banned from doing any coaching at a match.’ While Mourinho might have seemed to have lost the argument, his antics during his next ban, over the two legs of Chelsea’s encounter with Bayern, emphasised his reluctance to accept defeat.
Mourinho’s handling of players had changed. While at Benfica there were Sabry, for whom fate had disappointment in store, and Maniche, who played up in training, was banished to the reserves but two weeks later became club captain and ended up one of Mourinho’s European champions at Porto. But you hardly ever heard the crack of a whip around Chelsea’s training ground, at least not on the players’ backs. There, the boss was almost one of the lads. While they were lacing their boots, he told funny stories of occurrences in his career, much as a player would. When he had to be tough, he would be, as in the case of Adrian Mutu, but the distance another coach would keep between himself and his charges was not observed. On the field, it was a similar story, and when they celebrated at the end of a match, a stranger would be able to tell him from Tiago and the others only through the realisation that an on-duty player would not be wearing a cashmere coat.
According to Desmond Morris, the phenomenon is linked to football’s evolution. Morris and football go back a long way. The author of The Naked Ape, The Human Zoo and a dozen other popular studies of man and other animals, he has been watching the game for more than seventy years and was a director of Oxford United during their rise (funded by Robert Maxwell) to the top division in the eighties. ‘There was a time,’ he said, ‘when the captain was an important figure. In modern football, his role has become all but non-existent and the manager has taken over, leading the team and connecting it to the public through television, radio and other media, generally representing it. The manager has become a performer and the good manager will always support his team. Mourinho, though, identifies with his team more than any other manager. He is passionately involved with them. In his imagination, he is out there with them. He really is the twelfth man. As for keeping a distance, he doesn’t feel a need to do it. He gets on the pitch and celebrates with them and that is what makes him different. You couldn’t envisage Alex Ferguson jumping on a player’s back. Or Arsène Wenger. That’s why I disagree slightly with the portrayal of Mourinho as a father figure to his players. He is more like an elder brother. Or the leader of the gang.’
There was, nevertheless, an element of awe in the players’ perception of Mourinho. ‘He jokes with everyone,’ said Frank Lampard, ‘but at the same time you’re a little bit wary of him.’ Perhaps they sensed what Roxburgh always discerned behind his charismatic façade: a willingness to make ruthless decisions. ‘It’s one of the elements of management,’ said Roxburgh. ‘Fergie has always had it. He can like you as a person but make a decision that hurts you.’ In Ferguson’s case, the mind usually travels back in time to the dropping of Jim Leighton, who, after keeping goal more than reliably for Aberdeen throughout their greatest years, followed Ferguson to Manchester United and, having performed unconvincingly in the 1990 FA Cup final against Crystal Palace, a 3–3 draw, lost his place for the replay five days later; United won 1–0 and Leighton’s career entered the doldrums (though, having returned to Scotland, he revived it and even became his country’s oldest international at forty). Mourinho, too, could separate his human feelings from the cause of the team, said Roxburgh, and we could expect to see that if anyone repeated Adrian Mutu’s error in letting him down. Might this ruthlessness, also evident in the rapid rebuilding of Porto, have been picked up from Louis van Gaal, the man who dropped Rivaldo? ‘It’s intrinsic,’ said Roxburgh. ‘It might have been lent emphasis by the time he spent with Louis, but I think it was already there inside him.’
The most exciting part of management calls for tough decisions to be made very quickly. It is the bit we see: the match. Sir Bobby Robson has a story about that and he told it at one of Roxburgh’s UEFA gatherings. ‘It was in Barcelona several years ago,’ said Roxburgh. ‘We had our fifty-two coaches from fifty-two countries and Bobby was giving a lecture on crisis management. He was talking about a time when hi
s Barcelona side were getting whacked 3–0 at home and the white hankies were up and the whole bit. We were showing clips from the game as the goals went in and saying, “What were you thinking now, Bobby?” and Bobby replied, “At that point, I was thinking about a taxi.” And then, having pulled two goals back early in the second half, they let in another. When we asked Bobby what he was thinking then, I remember Rinus Michels in the front row shouting, “Get that taxi!” And yet Barcelona won the game. José was beside Bobby in the dugout and I thought back to it when I watched José send on three substitutes at half-time when Chelsea were losing at Newcastle in the FA Cup.’ So did Robson.
Let him take up the tale of that Barcelona match. ‘It was against Atlético Madrid in the Cup and that, in Spain, means war. The capital against Catalunya. Whether it’s Real or Atlético, it matters to our crowd. So when we go 3–0 down the hankies start fluttering. I nudged my assistant. “José,” I said. “It’s snowing.” I had a look across the pitch and formed an idea. I didn’t like the way Laurent Blanc was playing and I didn’t think much of Gica Popescu either. So both of those central defenders were candidates to come off. I thought I’d do that – even though Popescu was our captain and there were still several minutes to go to the interval – and replace them with attacking players, people who might get us goals. After all, what did we have to lose? The only way we could save the game was by going forward.’ A measure of defensive capability would still be provided by Abelardo, Sergi and Fernando Couto. ‘I remember telling José what I was going to do and asking what he thought about it. “You’ve got no option, Mister,” he replied. “Do it.”’ Blanc and Popescu were called to the bench together and Hristo Stoichkov and Juan Antonio Pizzi took the field. Within five minutes of the resumption, Ronaldo and Iván de la Pena had struck. Atlético’s Milinko Pantic retaliated by completing his hat-trick. ‘A bloody soft goal,’ said Robson, recalling a blunder by his Portuguese goalkeeper, Vítor Baía, who was later to become a European champion under Mourinho at Porto. ‘Anyway, that’s us 4–2 down. Then we scored three! Figo, Ronaldo and finally Pizzi. So we won 5–4. And we were still going like pistons at the end. Another twenty minutes and we’d have won 8–4. There were some stunning shots.’
Robson’s message to his fellow coaches at the UEFA gathering, said Roxburgh, was twofold: ‘Keep calm – and always give the other coach a problem. Don’t just send on a big striker for another big striker. Change it. Give your opponent things to think about. I’ve seen Bobby make other triple substitutions that have come off. That’s why what José did at Newcastle in the FA Cup was interesting – even though it was probably too big a gamble. I think he gleaned a lot about management from Bobby.’
Robson, asked if the merit of being bold with your substitutions might have been one lesson that was absorbed, replied: ‘I hope so. Mind you, I don’t think he will ever again, as long as he lives, change all three at half-time when the score is tight. You do that when you’re losing 3–0 at half-time and stuffed anyway. The thing to do is change two and hold one in reserve – then maybe stick him on with twenty minutes to go. Yes, I have made triple substitutions. I went to Liverpool a few years ago and sent three on when we were 3–1 down with twenty minutes to go. We drew 3–3. Even twenty minutes from the end it’s a gamble. But forty-five minutes is too long, as José discovered. He was a little too bold that day, a little too confident in himself.’
Mind games: the fourth hat?
At the height of the controversy over José Mourinho’s reaction to the first-leg defeat Chelsea sustained in Barcelona and the subsequent retirement of the match referee, Anders Frisk, a few people suggested that I obtain a videotape of some of Mourinho’s appearances at press conferences and take it to a psychologist. So I consulted a friend of a friend who happens to be a psychoanalyst. He said it would be a waste of time: ‘You have to bear in mind that almost every conversation Mourinho has is part of his work, and that the ultimate purpose of each of these communications is not to communicate as such but to increase his team’s chances of winning. In a press conference, he is not talking to the people in the room so much as those beyond – his players, other managers, the FA and so on. The advice I would give is the sporting equivalent of what every political interviewer should constantly be asking themselves: “Why is this lying bastard lying to me?”’
Mourinho has couched it in language which would get past the Speaker of the House of Commons. ‘Talking to the media is part of the game,’ he has said. ‘When I go to a press conference before a game, in my mind the game has already started. When I go to a press conference after the game, the game hasn’t finished yet. Or, if the game has finished, the next one has already started.’ He has also said that both he and Sir Alex Ferguson like these mind games and they certainly seem no more able to resist them than the player who is unable to keep his tugging hands off a passing opponent’s shirt. Indeed Mourinho and Ferguson, when opponents in England, appeared as hopelessly addicted to the mind-game habit as stormbound gamblers betting on which of two raindrops rolling down the outside of a window will be the first to reach the sill. Whichever metaphor you chose, it was the competitive instinct at work. Plus, perhaps, an element of ego in the case of Mourinho, whose maintenance of contact with his homeland through frequent appearances in the Portuguese media could not be explained by the frequently aired theory that the publicity he attracted took pressure off his players.
It is not as if he were inconsistent. In November 2004, after Wenger had done a Ferguson and ranted at a fourth official during a Champions League match in Eindhoven, a soft-focus Mourinho sought to portray himself as the match officials’ friend, saying: ‘I feel like an angel when I see how other managers behave in relation to referees and fourth officials. I let these people do their work and get on with mine.’ To the protestation that he had been involved in several rows with referees in Portugal, he responded that he had become calmer since moving to England. This struck me as very clever: the kind of thing that, one day down the line, might have earned Chelsea a marginal decision. And rather nice too, a most welcome note of calm sanity amid the turbulence of the English game. A couple of months later, however, Mourinho was insulting Frisk and being escorted down the Cardiff tunnel. Some angel.
The suspicion was that Mourinho simply enjoyed the sound of his voice, especially when it was being mischievous. Few Chelsea players would have disagreed with Deco, who burgeoned under Mourinho at Porto, when he said: ‘In the dressing room Mourinho is quite relaxed, but when he gets talking to the press he likes to wind things up – he is playing a role.’ But he does know when to stay quiet in his team’s interests, unlike the more experienced Ferguson, whose head-to-head record in mind games against Mourinho is unimpressive. When Manchester United went to play Porto, the pair clashed in the technical area, Ferguson angrily complaining to Mourinho (so the fourth official could hear) about his players’ perceived exaggeration of the impact of tackles. Ferguson kept up the campaign in the press before the second leg, and one or two United players weighed in with some taunts along the line that their adversaries had been girlish. It was a little unpleasant. Yet, after it had backfired, both Ferguson and Gary Neville were quick to knock on Porto’s dressing-room door and wish them all the best in the next round.
Ferguson would be worth a place in any mind-game hall of fame. He might even have helped to define the art with his demand that Leeds United try their damnedest against Newcastle towards the end of the 1995–96 season, when Kevin Keegan’s team were being challenged for the title by Ferguson’s. Keegan, interviewed by Sky while wearing headphones – never an aid to a middle-aged man’s dignity – exuded indignation as he declared how he would ‘love it, really love it, if we beat them’ and was widely believed to have unsettled his own players at that moment. Although the season was all but over, United had come from a long way behind to take the title and, ever since, the words of the managers have constituted a large proportion, perhaps inordinately so, of the media’s cove
rage of Premier League football. But Ferguson, when he had another chip at Mourinho in the 2004–05 season, again came off second best. He said Chelsea might struggle when they had to travel to the north. True, they had lost at Manchester City – where Keegan was in charge – but once Ferguson’s jibe had been brought to their attention they took full points at Everton, Liverpool and Blackburn before clinching the title at Bolton. And then they won at Manchester United when they didn’t need to.
Yet he and Ferguson get on well personally and there has never been any serious trading of insults between them. Quite the opposite. ‘I respect Sir Alex,’ Mourinho said towards the end of the 2004–05 season, ‘but not just respect – I like him. He is a person to fight with but a person who, when the game ends, I can share a glass of wine with and speak openly.’ A sign that Ferguson reciprocated those feelings was that he had poked fun at Mourinho through the press, accusing him of offering ‘some cheap Portuguese plonk’ when United went to Stamford Bridge. Mind games could be seen as hard banter in that neither side wishes to lose face. But every coach to whom you speak insists that they have a serious purpose. ‘He wants to protect his players,’ said Louis van Gaal. ‘I am certain of that. I do it. And I find it logical that a coach should look for a way of helping his team to win the game. You can condition the environment for your players. Maybe he went too far in Barcelona, but later it came out that Frank Rijkaard had spoken to the referee, so there was an element of truth in what Mourinho said.’
An element. But surely he was still wrong to accuse Frisk of favouring Barcelona? ‘Yes,’ said Van Gaal, ‘but a lot of coaches have said a referee’s decision was wrong and been vindicated by television. I think the referee is always the main influence in a game. Mourinho got emotionally involved, because he is an emotional man – he always was, and now he can show it – and maybe he regrets the business with Frisk, but he cannot rewind the tape and wipe out what happened, so he has to go on. Such are the errors a coach makes at the beginning of his career.’ We cannot say with any certainty that Mourinho’s Barcelona antics worked for his team in the Champions League, but it is a fact that they eventually ousted Barcelona with a goal that should not have been allowed. As for the questionable goal-line decision that Mourinho claimed went against them at Anfield, it may actually have worked in their favour. That is on the assumption that the referee would otherwise have awarded a penalty and dismissed Petr ech.
Mourinho: Further Anatomy of a Winner Page 14
