As always, the English press were looking forward to an encounter with Mourinho – and he didn’t disappoint them. In the build-up to the first leg at San Siro, he first claimed to have all but single-handedly rebuilt Chelsea after arriving to discover that they had ‘bought the wrong players’ – Lampard? Makelele? ech? Robben? – and declared that having been offered the England job had made him the proudest man in the world. Had he taken it, Mourinho would have had to deal with his former captain’s frailty; John Terry had just been relieved of the England armband by Fabio Capello.
But now it was Terry’s vulnerability on the pitch that Mourinho noted. The central defender gave Diego Milito space in which to shoot Inter into an early lead. Salomon Kalou was threatening to equalise when Walter Samuel brought him down. There was no penalty, no red card – and, of course, no reaction from Mourinho, whose weekend histrionics during a Serie A match against Sampdoria in which Samuel and Ivan Cordoba were sent off had brought him a three-match dugout ban. Kalou did later bring Chelsea level, only for Esteban Cambiasso to score a spectacular second for Inter. And so it was off to the Bridge, where a strange pessimism pervaded the pre-match atmosphere. From Fulham Broadway tube station to the stadium, the talk among the Chelsea support was only of how their friend would somehow find a way to beat their team. The fans were right. And Inter deserved to win. They mounted a relentless physical challenge. Any Chelsea player in possession was harried without mercy. Creativity was near-impossible and, when Wesley Sneijder sent Samuel Eto’o through to score twelve minutes from the end, the home cause was lost. There was still time for Drogba to get himself sent off. As much as at any time since Mourinho had left, Chelsea looked to be missing him. As his barbed observation before the second leg had put it, he and the club had gone their separate ways: ‘I keep winning things, they keep winning something … the FA Cup.’
Yet the exit from Europe was to prove their path back to the League title as well that season. As Ancelotti’s Chelsea marched towards the double, Mourinho’s Inter waged a campaign on both the home and overseas fronts. They beat CSKA Moscow home and away to set up a semi-final meeting with Barcelona that was all the more piquant for the deal the previous summer that had seen Mourinho’s club swap Zlatan Ibrahimovic, the much-debated but undeniably prolific Swede, for Eto’o and £40 million. Eto’o emerged by far the more successful signing, though it was Sneijder, arguably the star of the European season, who cancelled out Pedro’s opening goal at San Siro and Maicon, the attacking right-back, and Milito who gave Inter a 3–1 advantage.
The Camp Nou was less fearful of Mourinho than Stamford Bridge had been. But he still silenced it, even after Thiago Motta, the Brazilian midfield blocker, had been sent off in the first half for pushing a hand into the face of Sergio Busquets, who promptly collapsed and infamously peeked from between his hands to check that Motta had been red-carded by Frank de Bleeckere, the Belgian referee. Mourinho swept up a scornful arm. But he had come to ‘park the bus’ (to borrow the phrase he used at Chelsea once when Tottenham came in ultra-defensive mood) and such a tactic can work with ten men. Inter made it work, not even attempting to get to the other end of the field, and there were just seven minutes left when Gérard Pique scored the only goal of the match. Inter were through to the final and, after De Bleeckere’s whistle had confirmed it, as the Barcelona anthem plaintively rang round the vast bowl, Mourinho ran on to the pitch and, fiercely staring, stood pointing in solidarity to the Italian fans on the top tier. It was too much for Victor Valdes, the goalkeeper attempting to restrain him before himself being escorted away. Mourinho then left the field and went to the little chapel in the bowels of Barcelona’s stadium and wept. Back in the dressing room, most of his players were in tears. Once they had composed themselves, they emerged to pay tribute to the coach’s rigorous preparation.
He, and they, would have to do it all over again if the trophy was to be lifted in Madrid, where they were to face Bayern Munich, coached by Mourinho’s former Barcelona boss Louis van Gaal. They greeted each other with a cordial embrace before the kick-off. Bayern began brightly and Martin Demichelis, with a header from a corner, and Mourinho’s old friend Arjen Robben might have put them in front. But Milito made them rue those misses when, played in by Sneijder, he coolly waited for the Bayern goalkeeper, Hans-Jorg Butt, to commit himself before lifting the ball into the net. Mourinho’s keeper, Júlio César, then underlined his importance to the side by denying Thomas Müller as Robben continued to probe the Inter defence, so troubling Christian Chivu at left-back that Mourinho was obliged to switch his vastly experienced captain, Javier Zanetti, to the task. But Bayern left just enough space at the back for Inter to attack on the break and, with twenty minutes left, Eto’o slipped Milito through for his second goal of the night. It was the Argentine’s sixth in eleven Champions League matches. Naturally he was central to the celebrations that followed.
While a testy Van Gaal complained that the more creative team had lost to mere counter-attackers, Mourinho basked in the glory of having won the European title with two clubs. He had done it previously with Porto and Van Gaal with Ajax (whose youngsters had been victorious over Milan in 1995). So the pupil had beaten his teacher to a distinction previously achieved only by Ernst Happel (Feyenoord 1970 and Hamburg 1983) and Ottmar Hitzfeld (Borussia Dortmund 1997 and Bayern 2001). He was well aware of all the historical implications of Inter’s win: of how, when they last took the title by beating Benfica on the home soil of San Siro in 1965 (Real Madrid had been overcome in Vienna a year earlier), the club’s patron had been Moratti’s father, Angelo; and certainly of what lay before him, including the possibility of guiding a third club to Europe’s pinnacle before he reached the age of fifty at the end of January 2013. That gave him two seasons and such was the Mourinhomania that lingered after the crowds had drifted away from the Bernabéu that it seemed almost odds-on.
For Mourinho was to stay at the Bernabéu. It was an open secret that, just as he had left Porto after winning the Champions League, he was to walk away from Inter – with equal honour, it transpired – to join Europe’s most garlanded club of all. Within days, Florentino Peréz, the president of Real Madrid, had duly tendered a contract for him to sign and a new chapter had begun.
The nerazzurri hordes would never forget his two years with them. True, he could be said to have fixed something that was hardly broken, for Inter had become accustomed to Serie A titles before Roberto Mancini’s surprising resignation. But to transform them into a European force, to elevate them to a perch that had become unfamiliar to Italian clubs with the all-too-obvious exception of the rossoneri of Milan, was quite something. Something they were to lose almost as soon as he left.
The rebuilding job
When, in the summer of 2008, he installed his family in a house near the Swiss border and began work at Inter’s lovely training ground near the small town of Appiano Gentile, there was hardly an Italian to be seen around the place. Not on the playing staff anyway: only one Italian, Marco Materazzi, the ageing warrior once of Everton but probably best known for having so incensed Zinedine Zidane in the 2006 World Cup final that the great Frenchman butted him in the chest and was sent off, was among the fourteen who appeared in Mourinho’s first Champions League match with the club, a 2–0 victory over Panathinaikos in Athens. Latin Americans were in the majority with five Brazilians including Júlio César and Maicon, Zanetti and Cambiasso from Argentina and Ivan Cordoba from Colombia and that was not radically to change, for Materazzi was also the sole Italian to appear in the triumph in Madrid some twenty months later, coming on for Milito in a sentimental substitution a couple of minutes from the final whistle. The fourteen that night featured four Argentines, including Milito, and three Brazilians. But maybe the catalyst for change, the key to the transformation – Mourinho aside, of course – had been the second of two Africans to arrive in successive summers.
Sulley Muntari, the Ghanaian midfield player, had been signed almost as soon as Mourinho j
oined the club, along with Ricardo Quaresma, a Portugal winger apparently destined to disappoint, and Mancini, a very quick Brazilian who also played wide and failed to last at the club. But the truly significant signings were made a year later when the sale of Ibrahimovic for an estimated £60 million, including the value put on Eto’o, did much to fund the arrival of not only the Cameroonian striker but Sneijder, a snip at £13 million from Real Madrid, Milito, the outstanding Brazilian defender Lucio, and Goran Pandev, the clever Macedonian, all of whom conspired in the eventual triumph over Bayern. For Mourinho to have integrated them into the most effective unit in European football in just a year was extraordinary.
But he didn’t plan it that way. Nor could he be credited with genius in the transfer market as well as on the training field. Because, having initially built his team around Ibrahimovic, he would have been happy to continue with such a policy at the front. Until it became clear that Ibrahimovic had his heart set on that move to Barcelona. Pep Guardiola was equally keen to offload Eto’o, with whom he had fallen out. So that was the start of it. As for Milito and Thiago Motta, their moves from Sampdoria had already been arranged by Marco Branca, who, as Inter’s sporting director, supervised recruitment. Lucio might not have been signed from Bayern Munich if Mourinho had been granted his wish to bring Ricardo Carvalho from Chelsea (he had even tried to relieve his former club of Frank Lampard the previous summer, before settling for Muntari).
Where Mourinho did come up with a masterstroke was in realising that Ibrahimovic, who, with his majestic technique, could both create and finish, had to be replaced by two men. Hence the move for Sneijder, whom he resolved to put in the space behind Milito in the now fashionable 4–2–3–1 formation. He had devised the right method of play. And the rest, the drilling, was Mourinho’s meat and drink. The team was, as ever with Mourinho, built on a defence of military precision, protected by the likes of Cambiasso and, when available, Thiago Motta, as if their lives depended on it. Sneijder operated in what, recalling Porto, you might call the Deco role. He was principally responsible for unlocking the defences of opponents, Milito and Eto’o for finishing. Eto’o was impressively disciplined on the right. He was not the first big-name player to understand that doing things Mourinho’s way led to winners’ medals. In Madrid he won his third in the Champions League, after 2006 and 2009 with Barcelona.
As Inter developed in Mourinho’s second season, the Italians were treated to a familiar manifestation of his style. In the December, after a less than impressive draw with Atalanta in which Sneijder had been sent off, Mourinho was sitting on the team bus when he spotted a newspaper journalist in the space next to the bus reserved for interviews with the club’s in-house television station. Mourinho leapt off the bus and had sharp words with the journalist, who, it turned out, had been there legitimately. By the time Mourinho had apologised, everyone had forgotten the team’s performance and the dismissal of the coach’s key signing. Milito may have been alluding to such episodes when he said of Mourinho: ‘There is no coach like him when it comes to … reducing the tension within the team when things aren’t going well.’
Vieira: the value of trust
Patrick Vieira had known what to expect. He had done battle for Arsenal against Mourinho’s Chelsea and been told by Claude Makelele that he would enjoy working with him. ‘Claude was right,’ said Vieira. ‘He was a winner, first and foremost, but very clear and honest in his dealings with the players. We really took to him. When he arrived, I had a difficult time with injuries, but he established a trust between us. The trust between a manager and a player on the pitch is one thing. The trust off the pitch is another. And he assured me that I would be given time to get back to my best. He was fantastic with me. He made everything very clear. He made sure that no decision he made ever came as a surprise to me. That is very important. When he came to the club, the team was playing for Ibrahimovic. Because he was the man – he was the player making the difference in games. And for the first year of Mourinho it stayed that way. But then Mourinho changed things and it became a team of collective rather than individual effort.’
The visit to Old Trafford in March 2009, when Nemanja Vidic scored early and Cristiano Ronaldo made it 2–0 shortly after Vieira’s replacement by Sulley Muntari, was a significant milestone. ‘I think it told Mourinho what was needed,’ said Vieira. ‘It showed him which aspects of the team he needed to improve if we were to have a chance of winning the Champions League. And he did that at the end of the season.’
The next Champions League campaign featured Vieira as, at best, a substitute in the group stages and in the January he left, at the age of thirty-three, to rejoin Roberto Mancini at Manchester City, where the Italian had succeeded Mark Hughes. In Manchester, he was also to renew acquaintance with a twenty-year-old Mario Balotelli, who moved from Inter at the end of the season, after the Champions League triumph. Vieira’s memories of Inter remain fond, and much of that is to do with Mourinho. ‘Of course he had two or three players he could count on specially,’ said Vieira. ‘Zanetti, for instance. That was very important. But he made everyone feel they were trusted and that he believed in them. He was very close to his players. Between training sessions, you would be at lunch and he would take his plate and come and join you at the table. It’s important when you can create such an atmosphere between a manager and his players – really close, really trusting. I think that is why players perform for him. They are dedicated to him.’
There was also a bond between Mourinho and Moratti that may have helped Inter to achieve their objectives. ‘You have two big personalities there,’ said Vieira. And none of the tension that existed between Mourinho and Abramovich? If it existed, Vieira never saw it. ‘And, because of what they won together, there will always be a special relationship with Moratti, just as with the players. As for Moratti’s relationship with the players, it is like that of a father with his sons. He really loves the players and is close to them. And I don’t know a single player who has left Inter and not been sad because they are leaving Moratti.’
Several months before Vieira left, a departure from the off-the-field team had been André Villas-Boas. He had remained a member of Mourinho’s staff along with Silvino Louro and Rui Faria but yearned to strike out in his own right and, to this end, went home to Portugal in the summer of 2009. He was thity-one now and within a couple of months had found his job at Academica. The next summer ‘Mini-Mourinho’ – how Villas-Boas hated that nickname – was invited to Porto and his team were still unbeaten in both domestic and European competition when they clinched the Portuguese league with several matches to spare. When they overcame Braga, also from northern Portugal, in the Europa League final in Dublin, the echoes of Mourinho could hardly have been more resonant. Yet Villas-Boas always took care to maintain a distance and, to give him his due, his Porto had a much more attacking style than Mourinho’s. Already Villas-Boas was being tipped for leading jobs in England. He was, of course, on the radar of Roman Abramovich and, when the call came to return to Stamford Bridge in Mourinho’s erstwhile role, all of his commendable intentions to give Porto at least one more season went out the window.
England, his England
A recurrent Italian reservation about Mourinho was that his heart wasn’t really in the country’s football because so much of it remained in England and in November 2009, a week after Inter had boosted their chances of qualifying for the knockout stages of the Champions League with a gritty win in Kiev, he told me in an interview – at least I thought it was an interview – that he hoped to spend the next phase of his career back in the Premier League.
It was during an international break, when most of his players were away from Appiano Gentile. The workload was light and he had agreed to see me in connection with a biography of Sir Alex Ferguson, to whom he was only too eager to pay tribute. He mentioned having first met Ferguson when a humble interpreter for Sir Bobby Robson at Barcelona in 1996. Ferguson had come with Manchester United’s chairman, M
artin Edwards, and a senior director, Maurice Watkins, to buy Jordi Cruyff, and as the big hitters from both of these huge clubs sat round a table in a restaurant arranging the deal, Mourinho noticed how centrally involved Ferguson was in the talks. ‘He was fighting hard for his club,’ Mourinho recalled, ‘and an understanding of that dimension of management made me take an even greater interest in the English game, to fall in love with it even before I came.’ Later in our talk, he explained why England still attracted him. ‘I want to work with a different perspective,’ he said. ‘At Porto, my objective was to earn the right to go abroad. At Chelsea, my ambition was to create a little bit of history [the club had not been champions of England for half a century]. But I always knew Chelsea lacked the normal English culture of stability. I was never under any illusions. I understood the personality of Roman and the people around him [he carefully exempted Peter Kenyon from this] and knew that it was not a job for ten years. My role was to give this man what he wanted – victory – knowing that, sooner or later, my time would finish, because there were too many things going on around me. In Italy, I was coming to the motherland of tactics, the country of catennacio [literally door-bolt] and defensive football. The objective was to win not only in a third different league but a place where they say foreign coaches have little success. But the time will come for stability.’
Stability? What he meant was that England’s leading clubs had long-term managers: Ferguson had been at United since 1986, Arsène Wenger at Arsenal since 1996, and even Rafael Benítez had been at often-troubled Liverpool for more than five years, since the same summer of 2004 in which Mourinho had arrived at Chelsea. While clearly it was unrealistic to hope to match Ferguson’s one-club longevity, he did have a wish to build as Ferguson and Wenger had done. Mourinho added: ‘I love Inter and would love to build for the future here. In fact, I am doing it now because I am not a selfish coach and I’m thinking about the future in terms of youth development and the age structure of my team – but Italy is not the country for this. England is the country. And my football is English football.’
Mourinho: Further Anatomy of a Winner Page 21
