In the end, Jose Mourinho pokes everybody in the eye

After Chelsea had lost at home to Liverpool last October, Jose Mourinho held a meeting with his coaching staff in the centre circle at Stamford Bridge.

Mourinho had refused to answer questions in his post-match TV interview. “I have nothing to say,” he repeated for most of the 55 seconds on camera, before heading off to say nothing to other media outlets. https://twitter.com/SportsJOEdotie/status/735890774286442496 Mourinho felt hounded and persecuted by the authorities, later encouraging journalists to give their opinions because they didn’t have to watch out for The Man as he did. But the sight of him assembling his backroom team on the field 45 minutes after the match had finished suggested some a deeper problem. A couple of months later, after Mourinho had been sacked, it was reported that the players with whom he had become estranged in the Chelsea dressing-room saw this gathering as further evidence of his paranoia. Out on the pitch, there was no chance of his meeting being overheard or picked up by a microphone.

Out on the pitch, he could speak freely. In the centre circle, only the eyes of the world were on him.

Of course, the problem with this theory was that everything Mourinho said could be seen and subsequently published.

Newspapers employed lip-readers to decipher what he had discussed with his assistants which turned out to be mundane and of little consequence.

Nothing Mourinho said would have sent a spook or rat scurrying to type up a transcript, but that was not the point. For Mourinho, it was important for the world to know that he was under siege, that the only safe place in this den of intrigue he now inhabited was in front of the cameras.

The spotlight was his panic room. If the world concluded from this that he was teetering on the brink, so be it. The self-destruction would be televised.

In his final months at Real Madrid, Jose Mourinho appeared to be at war with everyone. Pep Guardiola had left Barcelona in 2012, at the end of a season when Mourinho’s Madrid had won La Liga with 100 points, nine clear of their rivals.

By the beginning of December of that year, Madrid and Mourinho looked done. They were already 11 points behind Barcelona. With Guardiola gone, Mourinho was in search of a new nemesis.  As is often the case with Mourinho, ultimately his greatest threat came from himself. That week Marca ran an article which suggested who the club should look for as their next coach.

“The club needs a leader who has a way with words like Jorge Valdano, but can also be demanding. A man who honours his contracts and does not break agreements when he feels like it, like Fabio Capello. A coach who puts everything into his job, like Rafa Benítez.

"Real Madrid needs someone who can create their own style of play which differs from the rest, such as Johan Cruyff, from which Pep Guardiola took inspiration. A man who knows when someone that is not broken does not need to be fixed, like Tito Vilanova.

"A manager who is elegant, like Manuel Pellegrini. Someone who knows how to handle the press, like Unai Emery. A coach who will not be deterred by the highest challenge, like Vicente del Bosque.

"In short, anyone but Mourinho.”

David Mamet said we are “crazed to get into relationships and crazed to get out of them”. They have been selling Jose Mourinho scarves outside Old Trafford since last December, an indication that some have been crazed to get into this relationship.

Mourinho’s appointment as Manchester United’s manager will relieve many supporters who will feel a new sense of optimism about the club which, once again, can anticipate another period of success.

They may also accept that one day in the near future, it will all end, probably in the kind of disharmony they witnessed at Chelsea and Real Madrid.

When it does end, they might be crazed for their club to get out of their relationship with Jose Mourinho, or they might blame others for driving him away. More importantly, by then it might not matter.

After all, the tenures of David Moyes and Louis Van Gaal ended with bickering and the stories of disgruntled players, but they only became relevant because they had failed. When he goes, Mourinho has usually brought success, even if he has also torn the place apart.

Mourinho has been hired because United can’t take any more chances with success. The fabric of the club, the abstracts that people like to talk about matter less than the problems on the pitch. He follows Moyes and Van Gaal in the job but he is the successor to one man: Alex Ferguson.

The two managers have very different ways of pursuing the thing that consumes them. Stephen Hunt tells a story of encountering Mourinho in Harrods shorty after his accidental collision with Petr Cech left the goalkeeper with a fractured skull.

Mourinho had claimed that Hunt had intentionally injured Cech, while also attacking the ambulance service who had been on duty at Reading on the day. Yet when he saw Hunt in the department store, he didn’t ignore him or continue the battle. Instead, he shook his hand and asked him how he was.

It was a strange, surreal moment and Hunt was left wondering if it was all a game. While Ferguson might have confronted Hunt and asked him how he could be out shopping at a time like this, Mourinho’s battles would, for the most part, be conducted through the media.

Mourinho could have become Manchester United manager in 2013, but the club had too many conceits about itself at that stage. One by one, they have fallen away.

Time itself was seen as part of the Manchester United tradition when Moyes was given a six-year contract back then, but 295 days later he was sacked.

Van Gaal may not have played attractive football in the manner imagined by the Class of ‘92, but that might have been tolerated if he had played winning football. He had developed young players, which scored high on the checklist for the traditionalists, but that turned out to be a consolation, no matter how much it was part of the Manchester United Way.

There was, it turns out, only one way and it had to result in victory.

In the three years since Ferguson’s retirement, the sense of Old Trafford as a post-Tito Yugoslavia has grown. Both Moyes and Van Gaal have left to the accompaniment of players briefing against their methods. Moyes banned chips; Van Gaal banned freedom of expression.

They were seen as unbending and unreasonable men, but the truth is that neither was able to govern the independent republics that have been established since the great dictator left the stage.

That job now falls to Mourinho, who will have some obstacles to overcome in his first few months as he tries to establish his own power and control at a club which pines for strong and successful leadership.

Manchester United will hope that the Mourinho they are employing is the same man that inspired Chelsea twelve years ago, but the club he is entering now is not the Chelsea he inspired twelve years ago. And he will be working with players who know more about him than the players did when he arrived at Stamford Bridge.

In 2004, the Chelsea players quickly became devoted. Frank Lampard recalled in his autobiography the moment he emerged from a post-training shower during that first pre-season in the US to find Mourinho waiting for him.

Mourinho looked deep into Lampard's eyes and told him he was the best player in the world. Lampard felt uncomfortable, especially as he was naked, although that also heightened the sense that what they were experiencing was a profound moment of connection between two men.

Mourinho repeated the compliment, explained what he meant and how exactly Lampard would go on to conquer the world, with Jose guiding him.

“Ok, boss,” Lampard said, eager to end this slightly awkward situation but simultaneously never feeling so good about feeling so awkward.

“He has an intuitive understanding of the way people work,” Lampard wrote, “of their dreams and desires, and how to harness that energy and convert it into a winning formula.”

Many expect him to produce that winning formula at Old Trafford, but Mourinho arrives with the knowledge that a detailed briefing given to several newspapers last week by a senior figure at the club included the revelation that some players don’t want him at Manchester United.

Ferguson used to say that a club which changes managers too often ends up handing power to the players. “If Sir Alex says it, it is doctrine,” Mourinho said when that theory was put to him when he returned to Chelsea. Now Mourinho will find out if that is the case at United.

He will naturally laugh off the idea that there is opposition to his appointment. If Mourinho was anybody but Mourinho, it would be possible to believe that he could do that, that he could see it as part of the natural way of a dressing room, a mood that will pass. But try as he might, Jose Mourinho always ends up becoming himself.

For United, the only question is how quickly it will happen and what will take place before it does.

On the day he was reappointed Chelsea manager in 2013, Mourinho presented a version of himself to the media which many wanted to believe.

He was returning to the club he loved a wiser and calmer man. He said he would have turned down every club in the world for Chelsea. Mourinho wanted to create a dynasty, something he was once too impetuous to appreciate.

Experience had taught him much. He welcomed the decision to give David Moyes the Manchester United job, saying that they were a club who, no more than himself these days, prized stability. Moyes would need time, he pointed out. For one thing he had never managed in the Champions League.

Mourinho also welcomed the structure of the club, the scouting and player recruitment done by others including Michael Emenalo, the technical director at Chelsea.

Mourinho made it sound so rudimentary. He simply couldn’t do all the things he had to do as manager of a club and pursue transfer targets as well. Also, if he watched a player it alerted the world to Chelsea’s interest. It was much better for others to do it. It was better for these things to be done privately.

Two years later when Mourinho left Chelsea having failed to establish a dynasty, Emenalo gave an interview and talked about the “palpable discord” that existed between the manager and the players.

Mourinho had spent the previous summer growing frustrated at the club’s inability to buy the players he wanted, especially Everton’s defender John Stones, who may become one of his first signings at United.

Between the summer and December, Chelsea disintegrated. Mourinho’s TV appearances became more and more bewildering, culminating in his post-match interview after his final game, a defeat at Leicester when he talked about his work being “betrayed”, as well as describing the ball boys at the King Power stadium as a “disgrace to the Premier League”.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kyLIMlCdW5A Two days after that defeat, Chelsea sacked Mourinho. Some said he had been fired by Chelsea for the second time, but if the first instance was dressed up as a departure by “mutual consent”, this was a dismissal.

At the next home game against Sunderland, the Chelsea supporters turned on the players they suspected of being the rats, of betraying Mourinho and destroying the chance of the stability he once had craved.

When Mourinho speaks as Manchester United’s manager, he will undoubtedly say all the right things. He will speak in awed tones about the traditions of the club, about all that Manchester United has provided for the rich tapestry of football. He might even talk about creating a dynasty, of building something substantial, of making Manchester United his home for many years. After all, Alex Ferguson was 51 before he won his first title in England. Mourinho is 53.

Mourinho may well mean all the things he says, but it won’t matter once he is consumed with his battles with Pep Guardiola, with Liverpool and with Arsene Wenger. And they will be the good times before, as he always does, he ends up poking himself in the eye.

And when that happens, the world will know about it. Mourinho won’t protect his dressing-room as Ferguson protected his dressing room, but maybe nobody cares if multi-millionaire footballers aren’t protected by their manager any more.

By then, their loyalty may have diminished, worn down by the demands to prove it that Mourinho often makes. And his public criticism if things go wrong.

In his biography of Mourinho, Diego Torres quotes an unnamed United executive who had explained why he had not been appointed as Ferguson’s direct successor.

“The problem is, when things don't go well for 'Mou', he does not follow the club's line. He follows Jose's line.”

United tried to do it another way, but they have failed. They have swapped a fantasy of long-term planning for the promise of something else. They are following Jose’s line now. It will only end one way. But for Manchester United, how Jose Mourinho's time ends is not as important as what that time may bring.