By now Chelsea’s thoughts of the Champions League were focused on the next season, for which Roman Abramovich and associates – but not necessarily Mourinho, for the seeds of terminal conflict were being sown – envisaged introducing three players, including Michael Ballack from Bayern Munich, and the hitherto devastating Andriy Shevchenko from Milan. They had departed the Champions League early in 2006 at the hands of Barcelona, with whom Mourinho clearly still had a problem. When Barcelona returned to the scene of the tunnel fracas the previous year, they exhibited the dignity you would expect from a Rijkaard team as well as the divine technique exemplified by Ronaldinho. On this occasion, however, the dominant character was the slight but abundantly gifted young Messi, whose torment of Del Horno ended when the left-back, after more than one botched attempt (plus an ugly intervention by Arjen Robben), chopped him down and was sent off. Own goals by Thiago Motta and John Terry having cancelled each other out, Samuel Eto’o secured a first-leg lead for Barcelona and most neutrals reckoned they were full value for it. Not Mourinho, of course. He tried to couch his criticism of Messi in humour, observing that Barcelona was a city of culture, with many fine theatres, where he must have gleaned the histrionic arts that had enabled him to roll upon impact with Del Horno, convincing the Norwegian referee Terje Hauge that he had been hurt. But when you stripped away the sarcasm, Mourinho was calling Messi a cheat. Even more gravely in view of the Frisk episode, he was implying that those in charge of matches involving Barcelona could not be trusted to show impartiality.
This, for many of us, was too much to take. But how could we blame Mourinho alone when UEFA let him get away with it? All those fine words after Frisk’s premature retirement and the two-match ban imposed on the Chelsea coach – ‘We will sanction anyone,’ said the chief executive, Lars Christer Olsson, ‘who makes inflammatory statements that could jeopardise the security of match officials and bring the game into disrepute’ – meant next to nothing because Mourinho’s fresh outburst was ignored. Chelsea were even able to pull off a minor propaganda coup on their coach’s behalf when they claimed that Del Horno’s offence, for which UEFA had disclosed he would be suspended for one match (the customary maximum for a red card is three), had thereby been deemed minor. In fact the punishment seemed no more than fitting for a crime less unsavoury than that of another Chelsea player, Michael Essien, at the group stage; the Ghanaian had made a dangerous lunge at Liverpool’s Didi Hamann. Essien was banned for two matches after television coverage of the challenge and Mourinho, when the Sky team next visited Stamford Bridge, sneered at their reporters: ‘They are pleased with you in Barcelona.’
Although Mourinho was to prove incapable of inspiring his team to another triumph over the great Catalan club, he was certainly bringing the best out of the media and Her Majesty’s press were in especially good form between the two legs of the Barcelona tie, for there is nothing they like better than to dip their bread in the rich gravy of a fall from grace. The Sunday People’s trenchant Paul McCarthy accused Mourinho of uttering ‘weasel words’ and went into well-argued detail: ‘What Mourinho said in the aftermath of the Barcelona defeat at Stamford Bridge has a direct link to those morons whose knee-jerk reaction is to threaten somebody’s life on the internet. The Chelsea manager’s default setting is conspiracy. It’s an attitude which panders to the lowest common denominator and those fanatics who believe everything – life, society and football – is against them and that the only response is to kick back against anybody who tries to grind them down. They pick up their cues from their leader, Mourinho, and react in the only way they see fit – by threatening the life of Norwegian referee Terje Hauge.’ In fairness to Chelsea, McCarthy added, they had removed such items from their website as swiftly as possible. But was there no one at the club who could tell Mourinho that too often he went beyond the pale? ‘All you see is Mourinho surrounded by fawning lackeys who don’t have the courage to stand up to him and tell him he’s wrong. There is a tainted and twisted view from within the club. They have never lost a big game, they’ve always been cheated. It’s never Chelsea’s fault, it’s always devious opponents. Or bent referees. Or the scumbag media. It is an ugly, unseemly way to run a football club and that is why I received so many calls from neutrals this week delighted Arsenal had won in Madrid and equally delighted Chelsea had lost to Barcelona.’
In the Sun, Steven Howard analysed Mourinho’s own altering image: ‘The public perception of a man originally greeted as a breath of almost intoxicating fresh air has now deteriorated to a point where he appears to be leaking poisonous gases. Once he was applauded for the winks, nudges and wisecracks because he did it with great style. Now, though, the undoubted charm is wearing thin. No longer viewed as the articulate, well-travelled raconteur complete with amusing riposte to anyone who might ruffle his prolific plumage, he is seen as fantasist, hypocrite and defender of the indefensible. Though blinded by double standards himself, he attempts to pull the wool over others’ eyes. In the programme for the first leg with Barcelona, he wrote: “Since our two great teams were drawn together, there have passed weeks in which Chelsea Football Club has said not a single word about this tie. But from Barcelona we have heard revenge, pitch [Chelsea had been accused of delaying the replacement of a worn Stamford Bridge pitch in order that Barcelona would be denied the benefit of the improved surface], battle, revenge, pitch, battle, revenge, pitch, battle.” And there, in one daft sentence, Mourinho successfully stuck his thumb in the festering wound.’ He was fooling no one. Nor would the press and public, Howard continued, continue to swallow such notions as that of Messi being an actor when they could see that Del Horno, more than his victim, had been feigning injury after the collision, ‘in an attempt to evade punishment’. But what could we expect, Howard concluded, from the man responsible for the Anders Frisk affair?
As withering an attack as any – a detailed and scornful description of how the Special One had become the Specious One – came from Hugh McIlvanney in the Sunday Times. ‘With the wearing banality of muzak,’ he wrote, ‘the complaints and conspiracy theories of José Mourinho thrum in our ears every time the realities of football deviate from what he sees as the irresistible destiny of his talents. Whether his consistently one-eyed view of events is the result of a genuine taint of paranoia or of calculated use of misinterpretation as a weapon, the effects are bound to be equally tiresome. Hypocrisy is a creature that no amount of meretricious dressing-up can make attractive. As Mourinho repeatedly excuses, tacitly or volubly, egregious offences by his players while unleashing a torrent of condemnation on the (often lesser) transgressions of others, as he twists facts mercilessly to suggest that rare unfavourable scorelines for Chelsea aren’t actually defeats, only injustices, his arguments are laughably self-serving. In his reaction to Barcelona’s Champions League victory at Stamford Bridge, a win marred by controversy but certainly not undeserved, he demonstrated yet again that he has become the Specious One. And he is in danger of becoming something worse: a graceless bore. Whereas once his mischief came across as the sophisticated games-playing of a cunning, worldly provocateur, amusing us with observations marinaded in irony and jokes tipped with venom that did no more than sting, steadily his methods of seeking to undermine anybody he perceives as an obstacle to his ambitions have coarsened into unacceptable offensiveness. His efforts to portray himself and his team as righteous purveyors of excellence, assailed from all sides by envy, cynicism and devious plots, sometimes relate so strangely to his own manipulative ways that they teeter on the edge of farce.’
*
Why had Mourinho become less popular in the country at large, as reflected by these columnists? His behaviour had certainly become more strident and repetitive and this may have been influenced by the growing tension behind the scenes at Stamford Bridge (though not on the stadium’s steep slopes, where Mourinho was greatly loved still, indeed already assured of undying affection). It is unlikely that he was affected by the condemnations of McCarthy, Howard
or even McIlvanney.
He hardly appeared a chastened character when his team were knocked out of the Champions League. They enjoyed the better of a low-key first half at the Camp Nou, but Barcelona could afford to be patient because they were ahead on aggregate and in the seventy-eighth minute all doubt as to the outcome was swept away, quite magnificently, by Ronaldinho, who ran straight at the Chelsea defence and, shrugging off Terry as if one of the world’s most formidable centre-backs were an irksome child, beat Petr ech. A few seconds from the final whistle, Frank Lampard equalised on the night with a penalty that had been awarded to Terry by Markus Merk even though Barcelona’s Mark van Bommel just got a foot to the ball before Terry’s fall. Barcelona did not protest unduly; television replays are a luxury unavailable to referees and the decision had been both marginal and academic. Mourinho, as ever, was discerning only what he wanted to put to use and afterwards, in the press conference, he insisted the 1–1 score had proved that Barcelona, although they had prevailed on aggregate, had been unable to beat an eleven-man Chelsea: ‘For me, the result at Stamford Bridge was crucial.’ He did not, of course, mention the dubious nature of the penalty that had preserved his weedy argument. Meanwhile, just off stage in the lecture theatre where he spoke lurked several of his assistants: Rui Faria, Silvino Louro, André Villas-Boas (presumably the others were keeping an eye on the referee’s room). It was an unusual scene. Were they there as minders? Or comfort blankets? Either way, it was hard to think of a precedent. Indeed it was impossible to think of a single major European coach who had not been happy to conduct his press conferences alone. What was it Paul McCarthy had written a few days earlier about ‘fawning lackeys’? These, to be fair, were worthy football men. But would they have the courage to tell Mourinho when he was wrong?
He seemed to have worked out that something was wrong by the beginning of April, when he was much more his old self in reacting to Manchester United’s closing of the points deficit at the top of the Premier League as if it were water and he a duck’s back. In fact, feathers and webbed feet were involved in the metaphor on which he artfully alighted as the media gathered to gauge his nerve in the build-up to West Ham’s visit to Stamford Bridge. A couple of days earlier, the country’s consternation about a long-feared epidemic of the so-called bird flu had grown when a dead swan was noticed in a picturesque Scottish bay. There was, it later transpired, no need for panic, but the results of tests on the swan had yet to be announced and Mourinho, when a reporter asked if he was worried about United’s increasing proximity, replied deadpan: ‘For me, pressure is bird flu. I am feeling a lot of pressure with the swan in Scotland. I am serious. I am more scared of bird flu than football. What is football compared with life? A swan with bird flu – for me, that is the pressure of the past two days. I have to buy some masks – maybe for my team as well.’ It was brilliant, flawless. Not only did he address any psychological doubts his players may have been encountering; he made the rest of us seem shallow, heartless even, for appearing to place the order of football teams above the health of the nation in our list of priorities. The final line was a clever touch, too: family over football. More classic Mourinho. Then there was the Devon Loch nonsense to deal with: the citing by Ferguson and some columnists of the racehorse that, infamously, had fallen when within forty yards of the winning post in the Grand National half a century earlier. ‘I know the story,’ said a well-briefed Mourinho. ‘But I tell you a Portuguese story, because in Portugal there are no Devon Lochs and no horses. We’re in the sea, in a boat one mile from the beach. I jump, because I’m a good swimmer. And this fellow wants to race me to the beach. I go, using lots of different swimming styles, and get to the beach, and walk on the beach. When he reaches the beach, he dies. We call it “dying on the beach”. He shouldn’t chase me! He should say to the boat, “Take me a little bit closer.” He’s so enthusiastic chasing me, but he has a heart attack. That’s our Devon Loch.’ A shade brutal in its impact, perhaps, but, as parables go, not the hardest to interpret. And one whose message his team were only too capable of driving home in their next match, with that wonderful recovery from the dismissal of Maniche. And duly, some three weeks later, United swam into West London, their campaign finally to die on the beach.
The celebrations were a little less euphoric than the year before – certainly on Mourinho’s part – and the body language between him and his players a little less eloquent. But the pooh-poohing of suggestions that he and Roman Abramovich’s project to bestride football would diverge was firm. Ballack arrived, with Shevchenko promising to follow. Mourinho still found time to talk about himself, even if he was doing no more than answer the questions of Henry Winter when he told the Daily Telegraph football correspondent: ‘When people say negative things about me, my family know what they have at home. They, and other people who know me well, think that sometimes I shouldn’t be such a “club man”. They say to me, “A lot of managers think more about themselves than the club.” With me, I put the interests of the club above my image. That makes my life a little more difficult.’ But he added: ‘I cannot change. I am the leader of the group. Today it is Chelsea, before it was Porto and tomorrow it could be somebody else. I cannot worry about my own image. Critics cannot change me. No chance! I never hide when my team lose. I can disappear when my team win.’ Like he did when they won the title at the Bridge?
The more successful a man becomes in football, the more lackeys he acquires, and the more they fawn, the less he has to make sense; Sir Bobby Robson alluded to it when he spoke of power. It can frequently be found in the anatomy of a winner and in May 2006, after the Barclays panel had met for the last time before dispersing for a World Cup summer, Mourinho was declared Manager of the Year. Not of the month. Of the year. Although he could not attend the presentation dinner, he did send a recording which expressed his gratitude, coupled with a puckish bewilderment about the lack of monthly awards. How, though, could the panel have overlooked his achievement over the year? How could they not acknowledge that although a little of the magic might have worn off, although the love affair with the English people had temporarily faded and Chelsea had become as unpopular as Manchester United, he was still a bit special?
PART SIX
From infighting to ecstasy
A Bridge too far
José Mourinho’s last complete season at Stamford Bridge was routine – but only to the extent that it began with a home win and ended with John Terry brandishing a trophy, Chelsea’s second of the campaign. It began late in the World Cup summer of 2006 with a triumph over Manchester City in which goals from John Terry, Frank Lampard and Didier Drogba went unanswered and, after two from Drogba had won a stormy Carling Cup final against Arsenal at the Millennium Stadium, ended with Drogba confounding Manchester United in the first FA Cup final at Wembley since the demolition of the original arena in 2000. New stadium; newly familiar hands on the champagne.
On the face of things, little about Chelsea had changed. But the face of things was deceptive. Already there had been persistent rumours of conflict behind the scenes involving Mourinho. The assumption nevertheless was that two English championships in succession guaranteed him omnipotence, at least in matters relating directly to the team, much as Sir Alex Ferguson had earned the right to enjoy at Manchester United. We were to learn otherwise. Nor, given the regularity with which Mourinho had deposited trophies in Roman Abramovich’s lap – albeit not the increasingly coveted Champions League, which came six managers later – did many observers credit the full disruptive significance of the pre-season dealings. These saw some notable performers from the World Cup arrive at the Bridge: Michael Ballack, vastly experienced leader of the German hosts, came on a free transfer and big wages; Khalid Boulahrouz, a hard man for Holland, was recruited along with Salomon Kalou, an Ivorian team-mate of Drogba’s and – most dramatically, and most damagingly to Mourinho’s professional relationship with Roman Abramovich – Andriy Shevchenko, the great but ageing Ukrainian striker for whom
Milan, because they knew a crucial half-metre of pace had left his legs, were happy to take £30 million. Ashley Cole, England’s left-back, was to prove the odd man out: an unqualified success. Out went Hernán Crespo, this time for good; William Gallas, to Arsenal in part-exchange for Cole; Eidur Gudjohnsen; Asier De Horno; Robert Huth; Glen Johnson; and Carlton Cole.
While the doorkeepers at the Cobham training ground were getting dizzy as faces came and went, many miles to the north a more tranquil scene could be observed. The only newcomer at Manchester United’s training ground on Carrington Moor was Michael Carrick. Sir Alex Ferguson’s squad, into which such key players as Wayne Rooney and Cristiano Ronaldo had already been bedded, was to encounter the minimum of disruption and this was one factor in the transfer of the English title back from Chelsea to United.
There were others. High among them in order of importance were the cracks that had appeared in Chelsea’s unity and were to keep widening until Mourinho left the club. Indeed some considered internal politics the crucial reason why Chelsea had relinquished the dominance established in Mourinho’s first season, the campaign that had culminated in the 3–1 triumph Old Trafford could not stomach. Only in that season had the politics seemed not to matter. At its end, however, an appointment suggested to Abramovich by Piet de Visser, the veteran Dutch coach and scout on whose advice the owner had come to rely, began to split the club into factions. One group featured Mourinho and his assistants: you might, with due deference to the Scottishness of Steve Clarke and Baltemar Brito’s Brazilian origin, have called it the Portuguese faction. The other was created by the arrival of Frank Arnesen as director of football. Although, in his playing days, Arnesen had represented Denmark with distinction, he had spent much of his career in Holland, remaining there for a prolonged and highly successful stint as director of football with PSV Eindhoven before moving to England to join Tottenham Hotspur in the same capacity. At De Visser’s instigation, Arnesen had been invited to a close-season meeting on one of Abramovich’s yachts and engaged by Chelsea, even though it would entail the payment of compensation to Tottenham of an estimated £8 million. This created the ‘Dutch’ faction.
Mourinho: Further Anatomy of a Winner Page 18