In Tel Aviv, Mourinho told his audience: ‘A great pianist doesn’t run around the piano or do push-ups with the tips of his fingers. To be great, he plays the piano. He plays all his life and being a great footballer is not about running, push-ups or physical work generally. The best way to be a great player is to play football.’ That said, he added, a good coach must know more than football. ‘He has to be a leader of men and a coherent leader. He must make all his men feel big, not small.’ A compact squad is helpful in this context.
The influence of Louis van Gaal at Barcelona was clear from Mourinho’s tactical syllabus – possession and positional play had always been central pillars of the Van Gaal method – but the Dutchman had noted a divergence on philosophy. ‘He has more belief in defence than attack,’ said Van Gaal. ‘My philosophy is always – because I believe we must entertain the public – to have attacking play. His philosophy is to win! That is the difference.’ And in 2010, when Mourinho’s Inter beat Van Gaal’s Bayern Munich in the Champions League final, it was Mourinho who won. But nothing Van Gaal had said was to brand Mourinho a philistine. Mourinho had gone out of his way to deny that, for all his belief in preparatory work, he saw football as a science rather than an art; like most coaches, he considered the game a combination of the two (and could hardly be accused of stifling the flair of Mesut Özil or Cristiano Ronaldo at Real Madrid). But he never had any time for unnecessary embellishment, and a lauded example of his individual coaching when at Chelsea was his trimming of those fussy frills from the game of Joe Cole, who emerged a regular and productive member of the England team, until injury dimmed his light.
In Mourinho’s first few months at Chelsea, he was often exasperated by Cole and his tricks. An erstwhile boy wonder at West Ham, the Londoner seemed perpetually to be trying to vindicate his early publicity, which had hailed him as a new George Best, an English answer to Diego Maradona, and all the rest of the usual suspect theories. What Cole usually turned out to be was a very gifted midfield technician with a limited understanding of the necessity to play in a team context. It was not that he lacked will, but that he misapplied it and had a tendency to lose concentration. Chelsea had paid nearly £7 million for him in the summer of 2003, but Cole could not persuade Claudio Ranieri to establish him in the team; he made half of his appearances for the Italian as a substitute. Mourinho, having cleared out some of Cole’s competition in the creativity department – notably Juan Sebastián Verón – and been deprived of the unfortunate Scott Parker through injury, gave Cole some opportunities, but he soon lost his place to Damien Duff and in early October, after he had come off the bench to score the only goal of a home match with Liverpool, Mourinho alluded to the reasons: ‘After he scored, the game finished for Joe. I need eleven players for defensive organisation and I had just ten. Joe had two faces – one beautiful and another which I did not like.’
Nearly six months later, Cole was picked to start a World Cup qualifying match against Northern Ireland at Old Trafford. England won 4–0 and Cole, having scored the first goal in some style, shaking off a challenge and sending a controlled drive into Maik Taylor’s left-hand corner, performed with impressive maturity. ‘He has finally learned,’ said Sven-Göran Eriksson, ‘that football is not about making tricks – it’s about knowing when to do it. Today I don’t think he ever lost the ball in a stupid position, which was his problem in the past. He showed he can beat people – you want him to do that – but also keep it simple, and he showed he can defend.’ Cole had, in short, completed the journey from stage act to international footballer and he was not backward in thanking Mourinho. ‘He’s the first person to really look at me and my game,’ declared Cole. ‘I can genuinely say he’s had a massive influence on my career. I listen to him – he’s a European champion.’ And the public admonition after the Liverpool match had had its effect. ‘Something like that can ram the nail home and I know what I’ve got to do now. His criticism is always constructive. He’ll always sit me down and talk about my game and what he wants me to do. He’s so advanced with the tactical stuff and he’s made me really think about that side of things. There’s been a steady improvement and I can become even better.’
Deco was another beneficiary of Mourinho’s guide to self-discovery. It occurred to me during the latter stages of Porto’s successful Champions League run that here was a team so disciplined as to bear comparison with the Milan founded by Arrigo Sacchi or – the search for another example ended closer to home – George Graham’s Arsenal. Just as those teams were leavened by highly creative players, Mourinho acknowledged the necessity for flair by having Deco as a key man. For all his gifts, though, Deco did not just wait for the ball to come to him; he worked and probed and challenged until the openings came. In short, he was – to use a favourite word of Graham’s – productive. ‘Mourinho is special,’ Deco has said, ‘because he is one of the few people capable of changing a player’s mentality. He didn’t change the way I play – he improved it. He got me thinking a lot more.’ Deco, who was born and raised in Brazil, developed so well under Mourinho that he was encouraged to take Portuguese nationality. He made his debut for his adopted country shortly before the UEFA Cup final in 2003. It was at home against Brazil – and he scored the only goal. Much of Deco’s life had resembled a fairy tale; he even recovered from the disappointment of Barcelona’s defeat at Chelsea to collect a Spanish championship at the climax of his first season at the Camp Nou.
Another player of talent was Abdelsatar Sabry, an Egyptian known simply as Sabry in Portugal. He was at Benfica when Mourinho arrived in September 2000 and popular with the fans. Although skilled and with a knack of scoring in big matches, Sabry had no sense of team play. He was like an unreformed Joe Cole, only more so. He objected to Mourinho’s use of him on the left flank and, what was more, told a newspaper as much; he said he wanted a free role behind the main striker. Mourinho responded in public. He said Sabry kept giving the ball away and cited a derby against Belenenses in which he lost possession so often that, at one stage, Benfica were counter-attacked five times in sixteen minutes. ‘A number-ten player,’ Mourinho continued, referring to the playmaker’s role, the Deco role, ‘must display a high tactical level in order to be a link between the defence and attack – but not the defence and attack of the opponent.’ As if this were not a devastating enough dismissal of Sabry’s analysis of his own worth, Mourinho added that he was forever being caught offside. Oh, and he wasn’t scoring enough goals. As events were to transpire, Mourinho went and Sabry stayed, at least for a while. Two years later, when Mourinho was at Porto and a burgeoning Deco about to take the international stage, Sabry was at Estrela da Amadora, with little to celebrate but the favourable verdict of a court on his demand that Benfica stump up more than £200,000 in unpaid wages.
Mourinho has never been interested in players who are reluctant to learn and the quality of those he coached at Chelsea helped to produce swift results. Even in the Carling Cup final, one of his beliefs was effectively enacted. Earlier in the season, Scott Parker had alluded to it when he said: ‘We are doing a lot more ball work, playing keep-ball.’ This was to do with Mourinho’s concept of ‘resting on the ball’, which he has described as ‘keeping possession for the sake of possession’ on the grounds that it is safer to rest when your team, rather than the opposition, have the ball. When he was at Porto, an opposing coach complimented Mourinho after a match by saying his players had never come off the field so tired. Chelsea used the ploy in making Liverpool chase for long periods in Cardiff and afterwards Terry said: ‘We saw their legs go.’
Against Barcelona in the Champions League, the work Chelsea did on both aspects of ‘transitions’ (counterattacking) was manifest. Mourinho, asked by Andy Roxburgh which trends he had noticed in the contemporary game, replied: ‘Transitions have become crucial. When the opponent is organised defensively, it is very difficult to score. The moment the opponent loses the ball can be the time to exploit the opportunity of someone being out o
f position. Similarly, when we lose the ball, we must react immediately. In training I sometimes practise keeping a minimum of five players behind the ball, so that when we lose it we can still keep a good defensive shape. The players must learn to read the game – when to press and when to get back to their defensive positions. Everybody says that set plays win most games, but I think it is more about transitions.’
Mourinho would have appreciated something David Moyes said about Chelsea: ‘They’re a clever team.’ The Everton coach was referring to the match between the clubs at Goodison Park in February, when Everton’s James Beattie was sent off early for butting William Gallas. ‘It was interesting,’ said Moyes. ‘We couldn’t get the ball from them. They wouldn’t let it out of play and they didn’t concede free-kicks. We were doing everything we could to find a way of restarting the game with a throw or a corner or a free-kick so we could make it a scrap for the ball. With ten men, it would have been our best opportunity. They didn’t give us it and I remember thinking what an intelligent team they were.’ There was something else Mourinho did that day which Moyes, when I told him about it, thought clever. But it was more in the way of management than coaching, so we shall save it for a moment. They do, though, blend into each other, coaching and management.
Infectious, isn’t it, this global spirit?
Management
That day at Everton had presented Mourinho with a problem. Chelsea had led the Premier League for three months – since they beat Everton at Stamford Bridge – and although Arsenal had yet to recover the form that their Old Trafford experience had disrupted, Manchester United were challenging. Chelsea went to Merseyside with a nine-point advantage. United had a derby against Manchester City the following day. The dismissal of James Beattie seemed just what Chelsea would have wanted, but breaching a depleted team is not always easy, as Mourinho told us. He was responding to someone who asked, before the trip to Barcelona, if it were not a comfort at such times to be sitting on a cushion at the top of one’s domestic league. He smiled ruefully. ‘Maybe you won’t believe this,’ he said, ‘but towards the end of the first half at Everton, between the thirtieth and forty-fifth minutes, I felt the players were too anxious to score against ten men and lost their shape.’ Having devised a means of relieving them of their obligation, he strode to the dressing room. ‘I told them to let the game flow, because a point would be good, no problem. “If we drop two points,” I said, “we stay seven points clear, even if Manchester United win tomorrow. So there’s no pressure. Now let’s go.” I didn’t make any changes. I didn’t scream at them. I just reminded them of those nine points and said, “If we score, we score. If we don’t score, we don’t score.”’ He paused slightly. ‘I was desperate to score!’ Eidur Gudjohnsen obliged and Chelsea had three more points. United, though they won at the City of Manchester Stadium, realised – because that weekend, given the status Everton had acquired, had been seen as a milestone – they were fighting for second place. What did Moyes, now he had been apprised of Mourinho’s team-talk, think of it? ‘Great management.’
Management has always been to do with psychology. And Mourinho has never been above playing the odd trick on his own men. A few days before what turned out to be his last match with Benfica – the derby against Sporting – he decided to indulge his affection for tennis at the Masters Cup, which was being held in Lisbon that year. He went with his assistant, Carlos Mozer, and, having spotted the Sporting players strolling among the throng of spectators, resolved to turn this to his advantage. He told Mozer he was going to ‘poison’ his own team by telling them the Sporting players were obviously so confident of thrashing Benfica they had neglected to prepare for the match in favour of disporting themselves all week at the tennis. He was, of course, exaggerating wildly and later confessed to it; he had simply been spinning the tale in order to put an additional edge on his own players’ appetites for the derby, which they won 3–0.
No slight, real or imagined, is ever wasted. Most coaches do this but few have done it as effectively as Mourinho. Sir Alex Ferguson is a great exponent. In the Scot’s first big job, at Aberdeen, he used the city’s relative isolation from Glasgow, where the ‘Old Firm’ of Rangers and Celtic had traditionally ruled the game, to build a stockade mentality, and he contrived to do much the same at Manchester United, even though the club was the best supported in the land; the players were led to believe that everyone, including those in authority in the game, was out to get them or at least desperate to see them fail. When he and Mourinho faced each other in the Champions League, they were two of a kind. Mourinho, once Chelsea had all but taken the English title, admitted to using similar tactics. Or almost admitted it. What he said was that there had been a ‘psychological fight’ against critics who had called his team ‘boring’ in the opening weeks of the season. ‘Maybe the criticism made us stronger. We had to close the shell. We created something strong inside. We went through that period and then a beautiful period.’ And, once on top, they had remained strong. ‘We always look at newspapers and TV and every day there was a headline saying Chelsea will have a blip, Arsenal will come back, United will shock them, Chelsea will lose points in the north, Chelsea will lose points in the south. All season! We needed to be strong.’ I imagined him staying up all night in the team hotel, prowling the corridors when the newspapers came round and carefully cutting out all the complimentary bits before they could read them and go weak at the knees.
The most unusual facet of Mourinho’s management also pertains to his bonding technique. Scorning the convention that even the kindest coach must maintain a certain distance between himself and the players, he actually behaves like one of them, a sort of twelfth man. It was especially noticeable when he was at Chelsea. He celebrated victory over Barcelona by running on to the pitch, roaring and wheeling his right arm, with the fist clenched, so that the tail of the famous grey overcoat fluttered; lest it be thought he had succumbed to total abandon, however, I should add that he kept a firmly restraining left hand on the pocket containing his mobile phone. Then Mourinho jumped player-style on the broad back of his captain, John Terry. It was that great observer of the human race (and inveterate football follower) Desmond Morris who drew my attention to it. ‘I cannot think of another manager who could have got away with that,’ he added. ‘If Big Ron Atkinson had tried it, he’d probably have broken the poor lad’s back!’ But Morris had a point to make. ‘Both of Mourinho’s legs were off the ground. It was a piece of body language I’ve never seen in football before. It means he’s one of the players.’ What’s more, his participation in some of Chelsea’s wildest celebrations seemed perfectly natural in the context of that particular man and those players. As Ian Wright put it: ‘If another manager hugged his players, they might be sort of rigid, cringing, embarrassed. But you can see the camaraderie between him and the team. There is a deep respect there. You can see that they really love him.’
Love?
I thought that might be a bit strong. So I decided to ask a less excitable, more seasoned footballing figure for his impression. ‘No,’ said Gérard Houllier, ‘it’s true. He has this kind of complicity with the players. They don’t just like José. They love him.’ And he loves them, as you can see from his post-match tours. And they love each other, which became increasingly apparent during the march to the title when kisses were commonly exchanged.
In the match programme for the home leg of the Champions League tie against Liverpool there is a picture of Claude Makelele, his face obscured by the enveloping arms of Terry, who is leaning down and planting an earnest smacker on the top of his head; Makelele has his left arm wrapped tightly round the captain’s waist. Players do that kind of thing. But usually they do it with a grin. Although at Mourinho’s Chelsea some demonstrations of affection flirted with the outer fringes of the faintly nauseating, they did, I confess, also stir feelings of wonder at how it must be on the inside of such a passionate scrum, especially while everything is being carried before it. These p
layers had been led to believe in each other and throughout the 2004–05 season, courtesy of Sky television’s access to the pre-match tunnel, we could see Terry glance over his shoulder at colleagues who clearly shared his conviction that they could not lose. The central significance of Terry’s relationship with Mourinho to the events of the season was undeniable and in March the captain declared: ‘Every result is for the manager. He works so hard, him and his staff. On the pitch all of us fight for each other but deep down it’s for him. He’s the best, we believe he’s the best and we’re lucky to have him. Everything about the man is first class.’
Mourinho went about the job of unifying the Chelsea dressing room straight away. Cliques were out, he told the press quite bluntly: ‘You go to some places and maybe you find an English corner, a French corner and, at some clubs, a black corner. I don’t like any of that. It cannot work.’ There would be a common language: ‘If you are on my table for breakfast and I keep speaking Portuguese, you turn round and say, “Sorry, fuck off, I don’t sit at your table any more.” The language has to be English. If they don’t speak it fluently when they come, they must study.’ They soon discovered one reason why. Mourinho announced that the final team-talk before matches would be given not by him but by a player. Before the Bayern Munich matches, when Mourinho was suspended, the young German defender Robert Huth said: ‘We have a meeting with him two hours before a game and after that everybody is left to themselves because we all have different ways to prepare. Then we go for the warm-up, but it’s not like the coach has a big final word. He leaves it up to one of us to give the rallying call. We choose the player on the day.’ By ‘we’ he meant the players and staff: often Stevie Clarke made the final decision.
Mourinho: Further Anatomy of a Winner Page 13