What we could safely assert was that Mourinho would not stop playing these games. They are not prerequisites of footballing achievement; Rafael Benítez did not indulge in them before Liverpool knocked Chelsea out of the Champions League or won the 2005 final. In Istanbul, on the morning after Liverpool had completed one of the most amazing European triumphs by recovering from a 3–0 deficit to beat Milan on penalties, I asked Benítez why he scorned these little ploys. He smiled and replied: ‘Maybe my English is not good enough at the moment.’ So he had done it in the past, with Valencia? ‘No. I prefer to concentrate on working with my team. It is more important.’ Nor did Luiz Felipe Scolari, Marcello Lippi or Vicente del Bosque feel the need to play mind games while steering Brazil, Italy and Spain to success in the past three World Cups. They are just part of Mourinho’s style and, given what he has won thus far, unlikely to become unfashionable. To quote Desmond Morris: ‘The manager has become a performer and the good manager will always support his team.’ So the handsome young twelfth man of Chelsea would toy with the minds of opponents and referees and every other form of authority for as long as they let him get away with it. And do the same when with Inter, and with Real Madrid. To the minds of many people, what Mourinho said about Frisk and his later claims that a series of UEFA referees had favoured Barcelona were unacceptably impudent. Yet again some words of Machiavelli are apposite: ‘Fortune, like a woman, is friendly to the young, because they show her less respect, they are more daring and command her with audacity.’
PART FIVE
Behind the mask
Humourless? You’re having a laugh
A stranger arriving at Chelsea’s training ground between June 2004 and September 2007 might never have guessed that the dark and handsome man in the tracksuit was the boss. Mostly José Mourinho just went about his business deep in thought. Beneath the placid surface, however, was a volatile temper that kept people on their toes. Everyone knew the seriousness with which he took matters of detail, and when he felt that the heads of subordinate departments had not matched it, loud bellowing was often heard from the unfortunate’s office. Neil Frazer, the doctor who left a few months after Mourinho’s arrival, suffered on several occasions, notably when the wrong X-rays of Arjen Robben were produced. It could happen during matches too. Towards the end of a robust affair at Blackburn, the midfielder Tiago was called off and, when he came to the bench, the staff were not able to provide one of the replenishments required for a substituted player: it might have been a drink, or a tablet. Mourinho exploded and within seconds the physiotherapist, Mike Banks, was sprinting down the tunnel to the dressing room to fetch the missing item.
In consequence, things rarely went wrong and Mourinho’s behaviour was polite and charming, if brisk; he hated to waste time. People were told what he wanted and it was done. Very little happened without his being consulted, even if its link with the football side of the operation was tenuous. This was relatively new to him, this broad English view of the job, and, although it led to the odd tense moment with the chief executive, Peter Kenyon, he rather liked it. But he was happiest among the players and, when they came in for training, he joined them as they put their kit on and swapped tales. When they poked merciless fun at the masseur, Billy McCulloch – every dressing room has someone who serves as the butt of jokes – Mourinho joined in the laughter. It would have been hard to imagine Sir Alex Ferguson doing all of that, let alone Arsène Wenger. Or indeed the late Brian Clough. Yet in the early stages of Mourinho’s time in England, and especially in the aftermath of Clough’s death, a frequent criticism of the newcomer was that he lacked a sense of humour.
Alan Hansen, once the most elegant of defenders with Liverpool and now a Daily Telegraph columnist, put it thus after Mourinho had complained that Tottenham had ‘parked their bus’ (played ultra-defensively) at Stamford Bridge: ‘When Clough talked his mind – and I certainly never agreed with him all the time – he did so with one important quality in evidence. He was funny. Mourinho, for all his colourful opinions, is never funny. And we all know how hard it is to like someone who seems to lack a sense of humour.’ I suppose it depends how you define a sense of humour, but, if it involves a readiness to smile, even when the figure of gentle fun is yourself, Mourinho could hardly be found deficient. On the day he was banned from the dugout at Boavista, and Porto won 1–0 under the notional control of his assistant Baltemar Brito, he rang his players at half-time on the speaker-phone that had been smuggled into the dressing room, and told them: ‘I’m stuffed. You’re beating Boavista 1–0 and Brito is twisting the knife. After the game I’ll be unemployed.’ The players immediately began chanting, ‘Brito is the greatest.’ Mourinho clearly relished that for he told the story in his book. He took the joke, too, when Liverpool fans at Stamford Bridge told him to ‘Shush’ and, the day before, he had been in sparkling form with the press. ‘When I arrived here last summer,’ he said, stretching his arms wide, ‘my ego was this big.’ Had it got smaller? He grinned. ‘No, it’s even bigger!’ This brought the house down, but, while his chum Ferguson noted ‘a wit and humour about him’, a lot of the laughs he coaxed from us were derived from his aura as much as any special comic gift; he got laughs almost as royalty might. When Sir Bobby Robson was told about Hansen’s first impression of Mourinho, he replied: ‘Well, I can see what he meant. José was sober and serious a lot of the time. But there was plenty of the banter with the players and, as for me, I just thought he was a good lad to be around. I wouldn’t like to say he had no sense of humour.’ Maybe he just suffered, in this respect, from comparison with Clough, the home-bred iconoclast. As Desmond Morris told me: ‘Because Cloughie could be outrageous with a nod and a wink, people weren’t as offended as they might have been. He had this northern humour and used it as the sugar coating on the pill of his rudeness.’
But this was only the Mourinho we saw. The person who knows him better than anyone, his wife Matilde – ‘Tami’, as he calls her – spoke of the mask that often covered his feelings and how she could discern them through a gesture or a look. Mourinho’s father was always like that. A friend of the family told me Félix was ‘like an electric kettle – on the outside, smooth and steady, but inside boiling’. Mourinho’s mother was ‘a fighter’. So he had characteristics of both parents. But he was also very much a self-made personality with the knack of being able to separate his private life, such as it had become since he left Portugal, from work. ‘I don’t like to say that I’m a man with two faces,’ he told his audience at the Peres Center in Tel Aviv, ‘but José Mourinho the manager and the man are very different. It’s important to separate them and I do that very easily.’
The man was seventeen when he found his woman. She was fourteen. They met at a teenage disco in Setúbal, where Matilde’s family had landed after fleeing the newly independent Angola five years earlier; her father had served in the Portuguese forces. Nine years after their meeting, when José was teaching PE and, fortified by the course he had attended in Scotland the previous summer, coaching the Vitória youths, they were wed. Matilde, having graduated from the Catholic University of Lisbon with a degree in philosophy, was soon introduced to the nomadic existence of a football man’s wife. First there was the dead-end year with Manuel Fernandes at Estrela da Amadora and then the open road, the times with Robson at Sporting Lisbon, Porto and Barcelona, where the Mourinhos’ first child, a girl, was born. They gave her the name Matilde but, in order to avoid confusion, called her ‘Tita’. Four years later, their son was born. He got Mourinho’s forenames, José Mário, so the infant needed a nickname too and was given ‘Zuca’. Until around the time of the Portuguese revolution, it was almost compulsory for parents to hand their first names on to the eldest son and daughter. Today it is seen by many as an irritating anachronism, good for little else than the maintenance of the silly-nickname industry, and remains popular only among aristocratic or conservative families.
José Mourinho is of the latter tradition. Although his goalkeep
er father was of relatively humble birth, marriage introduced Félix to the advantages of association with fascist Portugal’s ruling class and, given the love and attention that surrounded José as he grew up, he could almost be described as the product of an over-privileged background; at least he did not have to fight his way out of the favela, the barrio or the ghetto, or leave a remote village at a tender age, like some of those who have acquired fame and fortune through professional sport. But he never asked for an easy ride. The Portuguese, to generalise, are often quite passive people, so much so that in such fields as marketing and the media many key positions in the country came to be occupied by Brazilians; in 2004 the trend even manifested itself in football when Portugal hosted the European Championship and the Brazilian Scolari was in charge of their team. The phenomenon is known as ‘reverse colonisation’. It does not affect Mourinho. No territory of his is ever negotiable. Yet he nurses the chip on the shoulder that reminds us of his nationality. No wonder he fitted in so well among those Scots at Largs. Because just as Scotland sometimes feels obscured by England, Portugal lives in the shadow cast by Spain. Or thinks it does.
Mourinho says his friends laugh when he is called arrogant. It does not surprise me because when you walk in his footsteps, you are liable to hear only the opposite. There was the story told by Tosh McKinlay about Mourinho’s warm greeting in Glasgow. Not long after I heard this, I happened to be in Lisbon for a UEFA Cup match between Sporting and Newcastle United and met Mourinho’s former pupil André Chin, who, having returned to Portugal many years after his family’s emigration to Canada, was working at the hotel where I stayed. This was in the spring of 2005. ‘I saw Mourinho not so long ago,’ he said, ‘when he was coach of Porto, around the middle of the season when they won the Champions League. I went to buy some fried chicken in this place near our house in Setúbal and there he was. He looked at me and I recognised him. I held out my hand and asked if he remembered me and then it dawned on him. “André Chin,” he said. “How long is it?” I said it had been sixteen or seventeen years. “My God,” he said, “that’s a long time. What have you been doing?” He always showed an interest in people. We spoke for about fifteen minutes and then he left. He’s a great guy and deserves all the success he gets.’
A similar conclusion was reached by Ian Ross, director of communications at Everton Football Club from 2001 to 2011, former journalist, long-standing friend of mine and, by his own admission, a ‘cynical old bastard’. He told me that, in his years at Goodison Park, no one had made more of a personal impact as Mourinho. ‘The habit here,’ Ross explained, ‘is that the visiting manager wanders around the tunnel and dressing-room area, keeping himself to himself and having next to no contact with our staff. There are exceptions – Arsène Wenger, for example, who, if there’s a lunchtime game on, comes up and very politely asks if he can watch it on television in the press room. People appreciate his good manners. Mourinho, on his first visit, just shuffled around with his hands in the pockets of his famous overcoat, greeting everyone and saying how welcome he’d been made and how he’d heard a lot about Everton. And I don’t just mean executives of the club. I mean he spoke to stewards and ball-boys as well. Sometimes people are in awe of the likes of Mourinho – but he was going up to them! The word spread around the club and, by the time he’d left, there was a sort of euphoric atmosphere around the place, as if it were a shopping mall that David Beckham had just been through. But it wasn’t just his charisma. Mourinho had actually taken time out to have a laugh with people and make jokes about our battle with Liverpool for fourth place. He was full of respect for the history of the club, and for David Moyes as a coach. Now I am a cynical old bastard, but I value courtesy above all else and it didn’t matter to Mourinho that he was speaking to people who had next to nothing compared with him. He was completely at his ease – and made sure they were. Like Wenger, he always introduced himself by name. He was, quite literally, unassuming. He lit the whole place up.’
Moyes didn’t find him arrogant either. ‘We had a drink and a chat down at Chelsea,’ said the Everton coach, ‘and I think the persona he puts over may be for the media. I suspect that behind it he’s got the same fear of failure most of us have. It’s what probably drives him. At our place, he didn’t come in for a drink, funnily enough. He’d come up to me on the bench and shaken my hand when there were still two minutes to play. He’d been criticised a couple of weeks before for not shaking Mark Hughes’s hand at Blackburn and I think the gesture to me was his way of saying, “I understand what you do in this country and I respect it. I’m not sure where it fits in my list of priorities. I’m maybe more interested in going to shake my own players’ hands than the opposition manager’s.” I can’t be sure. I may be off the mark there. But I think that, when he incurred a lot of the criticism, he was still finding his feet in a new country.’
There could be no more telling testimonial to a Chelsea coach than one from a Fulham supporter. It was at Craven Cottage, Fulham’s attractive riverside home, that I was approached by Ian Aitken, who acts as match-day steward in the press room. ‘The first time Mourinho came here,’ said Aitken, ‘we were walking along the touchline from the dressing rooms so he could be taken in to face the press – it’s part of my job to escort the visiting manager – when he suddenly looked across the pitch and said he loved the stadium. “Of course you do,” I said. “You’ve just won 4–1.” And he said, “No, I’ve always loved this place – it’s so old and traditional.” I presumed he knew it through the Bobby Robson connection [Robson both played for and managed Fulham]. Then, when they came back in the Carling Cup, I was expecting him to talk about the game. And he suddenly asked if I’d seen the film The Incredibles. I said I hadn’t and he told me it was marvellous. For a lifelong Fulham supporter to like the Chelsea manager is unusual, but I found him delightful – charming.’
Sir Bobby Robson recalled Mourinho having an affection for the cinema: ‘He’d talk of little but football. Except films. He loved them. I remember him once coming to me and saying, “Mister, I saw a great movie last night. You must go and see it. It was Forrest Gump.”’ A film or meal with his wife is Mourinho’s idea of a night out. He seldom drinks. When away, he relaxes by watching films on his laptop or reading. In his first winter in England, asked which book he had on the go, he named the autobiography of the Colombian Nobel Prize-winner Gabriel García Márquez. He reads the occasional novel. His books are usually recommended by Matilde, an insatiable consumer of literature. She also bought his grey cashmere coat, the one which became famous; it came from Armani, cost £1,200 and, at the end of a season during which it came to symbolise Chelsea’s success, Mourinho announced that it was to be auctioned in aid of a children’s cancer charity with which the club had become associated.
José – or ‘Zé Mário’, as he is affectionately called – ‘Tami’, ‘Tita’ and ‘Zuca’ lived amid the stuccoed splendour of Eaton Square in Belgravia for their first year in London, before finding a home close to Chelsea’s training ground in Surrey. They still cherished their other home in Setúbal, a fine edifice in its own right. Friends say they are unlikely ever to abandon José’s roots, the place where he encountered so much pleasure and one particularly tragic episode of pain: he was called back from Barcelona for the death through septicaemia of his sister Teresa, a diabetic who had never recovered from the break-up of her marriage some years before and suffered from a distressing variety of problems. Except to those closest to him, Mourinho never spoke about it: the mask descended. ‘I think she was always a worry for him,’ said a friend.
Teresa, before her health failed, had been vivacious and extremely pretty. Looks ran in the family and José’s have undoubtedly contributed to his success; not just his fame and sex-symbol status but his effectiveness as a coach. ‘People in football hardly mention this,’ said Desmond Morris, ‘but he is an incredibly handsome man, film-star handsome, and it’s the combination of that and his behaviour which really works. If he wer
e an ugly little man, his style wouldn’t be as effective.’ Mainly because players are only too eager to accept him as one of them; they respect him all the more because of his attractiveness to women. It is not so much necessary for any coach as specifically helpful to this one. He is cool. ‘If you were to cast someone to play him in a movie,’ said Morris, ‘it would have to be James Dean.’ Indeed; for he is dark and brooding and redolent of youth culture. The youth culture of this or any other age.
Although Mourinho has said his life is a typical Portuguese combination of the three Fs – Family, Football and Fatima (religion) – and has stressed that he keeps the work in a separate compartment, there does seem to be an element of narcissism about him that makes the limelight-hogging a labour of love. In other words, it must come from within and cannot be explained away by the assertion that a lot of nice actors play villains. But so what? He entertains us and has not hurt too many people. With the notable exception of our old friend Anders Frisk. Even that unalloyed fan Desmond Morris could not talk Mourinho out of this one: ‘It was something he very much wanted to hear [the report by two Chelsea staff members that the Barcelona coach had been in the referee’s room] and so he adopted it. In the heat of the moment, he made the mistake of saying he had seen it when he hadn’t. The whole thing then became a bad smell and he didn’t want to know about it.’ But then, you may recall, he made his tasteless joke on Portuguese television about being unable to discuss the performance of a Portuguese referee in case he quit: a joke that tended to vindicate those ambivalent towards Mourinho’s status as a wit.
Mourinho: Further Anatomy of a Winner Page 15
