Mourinho on the brink but this time it feels terminal
Having travelled so far to get to top, it’s hard to understand why he’s letting it go so easily
IS THIS the way he goes? The Portuguese PE teacher who rose to the very top in the new football order, sitting in his office refreshing Paul Pogba’s Instagram feed when Ed Woodward and the club’s head of HR tap nervously on his door? Suddenly, out in the car park, being led to his club Chevrolet with only a glance over his shoulder and the words of Keith Burkinshaw re-imagined for 2018: there used to be a multi-revenue stream, premium content provider over there.
Jose Mourinho is on the brink of his third sacking as a Premier League manager, and this one feels different. ‘Jose I’ was always going to have a sequel because so much was unresolved, not least the unusual buddy-story involving Mourinho and one of the world’s new super-rich, a man mysteriously in posses. ‘Jose II’ was about redemption and then later it was about betrayal. Or, rather, it was what Mourinho regarded as betrayal and everyone else saw as a Chelsea team too frazzled or resentful to do the game’s simple things, like defend properly, or pass the ball, or beat West Ham.
‘Jose III’ has been less of a ride, although trophies very much of the second rank have been involved. He has always felt like a temporary Manchester United manager because he has only been one expensive checkout at the Lowry Hotel away from leaving it all behind. Alex Ferguson stayed for almost 27 years. Mourinho has never even had a front door in the city.
No one expected him to build a club or buy a team but they did expect him to build a team and buy a house. ‘Jose IV’? Well, let’s just say that for the moment ‘Jose III’ feels like it could be terminal for the franchise, certainly as far as Mourinho’s Premier League career goes. Safe to say, Alexis Sanchez now knows how Hayden Christiansen felt after ‘The Revenge of the Sith’.
It has got to that stage where Mourinho is giving the post-exit interview pre-dismissal, repeating in television interviews and then his press conference after Tuesday’s draw with Valencia that he overachieved last season.
The man who was once prepared to take any question was complaining about individual journalists asking more than one each, which made you wonder, what happened to that guy from 14 years ago? In the same room at Old Trafford, the young Porto manager who got a draw to eliminate United in the Champions League semi-final of 2004 talked for so long that, eventually, he had to be politely asked to leave. Only so that there would be enough time for Ferguson to come in and be as sour as he often was in defeat.
For a man born and bred to be a manager, Mourinho seems ever less equipped to handle the natural vicissitudes of the job. It is such a contrast to the young Mourinho with his patience, through the years as Bobby Robson’s young consigliere, an upwardly mobile,
multilingual aide working on his connections in 20th-century football. Before then, Mourinho’s career started as a PE teacher in 1987, and according to the only account, worked happily for a couple of years in a series of primary schools, in particular with children with disabilities.
His first job in professional football was at Vitoria Setubal in 1989, the club his late father Jose Felix had played for and would later manage briefly in the mid-1990s. Jose junior began with the youth teams and eventually graduated to become Manuel Fernandes’s first-team assistant. He followed Fernandes to Estrela da Amadora and later to Sporting Lisbon when Fernandes was recruited by Robson as an assistant. There has been no career as extraordinary as his for the distance he has come, as a nobody and then as a somebody. Age seems to have eroded that patience, or perhaps it has been exhausted.
His life in football goes back 31 years, and it is hard to explain why Mourinho has become the way he has in the United job that should have been the pinnacle. He has had the Real Madrid job, but everyone at a certain level gets offered Real Madrid at some point.
Machine
At United, there was a pathway into the final part of his career, the chance to set the path of a great machine which, once on course, could almost run itself.
No one can pretend they are an easy club to manage, and the home-grown stars of the Ferguson era must seem so ubiquitous to an outsider to British football culture who does not remember them as the puckish, guileless youngsters they once were. While the English football public may well regard Paul Scholes as the wise repository of all the great and dreadful truths of the game – effectively an Oldham-based Dalai Lama – to those not steeped in his career, he must seem intimidating.
That was why Mourinho shut down discussion of Scholes’s criticisms on BT Sport on Tuesday, not out of arrogance but an instinctive survival mechanism.
When he was at Real Madrid, Mourinho would lament his exile from the English game. At the moment, he seems weeks, possibly days, away from his last big job in England. He worked so long and so hard to have the career he has had, it makes you wonder why he is letting it go so easily and so predictably. (© Daily Telegraph, London)