RONALDO ‘ENDORSES’ MOURINHO FOR JUVE

Duo have fond memories of their time at Real Madrid, despite differences

IT won’t all be “playing sailing” if Cristiano Ronaldo and Jose Mourinho get back together — it certainly never was before — but Ronaldo still remembers Mourinho as football’s greatest winner, not the game’s biggest whinger, and that’s why he would back the 56year-old’s return to management at Juventus as Massimiliano Allegri’s replacement.

Ronaldo has won five Champions Leagues and yet when he retires he will look back on the 2011-12 La Liga season as one of his greatest achievements. Beating Pep Guardiola’s Barcelona to the title and so knocking the greatest ever Barcelona team off their perch is hard to top and he achieved that arm in arm with his compatriot and manager.

Mourinho built the team to suit Ronaldo’s needs. His position on the left of the front three was never up for debate and it was a system that subsequent coaches Carlo Ancelotti and Zinedine Zidane maintained because they accepted it got the best out of the team’s best player.

Ancelotti adored Ronaldo — called him ‘worth a goal start in every game’ — and one of the biggest reasons why Zidane left last summer is because he sensed the club would do nothing to stop their all-time record scorer leaving.

But it was the bond with Mourinho that was the strongest because it was forged in the most

trying of times.

Barcelona were unstoppable but Ronaldo and Mourinho found a way — first in the Spanish Cup final of 2011 when Ronaldo got the winner, and then in the following league season.

What they won together was ultimately over-shadowed by what they did not win — three Champions League semi-final exits — and fallings out around those disappointments tarnished their relationship.

The last public image of Mourinho and Ronaldo together at the Santiago Bernabeu was of the pair in the mouth of the tunnel deliberately avoiding eye contact in the last home game of the 201213 season — dressing room illfeeling had finally poisoned their relationship.

The team had blown another Champions League chance at the semi-final stage and there was blame directed from both sides at the other party. The Champions League always seemed to test their bond.

In Mourinho’s first season when his tactics in a semi-final against Barcelona rubbed Ronaldo up the wrong way the player did little to hide his feelings. Mourinho had wanted the team to play for a 0-0 home draw in the first leg believing Real could get at least a scoring draw in the second leg at the Camp Nou and so go through.

“I don’t like to play that way, but I have to adapt to what the team asks from me,” Ronaldo said after the game. He had dropped Mourinho in it over tactics… and he was dropped for the next league game.

The biggest row between them came in Mourinho’s final season at the club when he criticised Ronaldo for easing up at the end of a first-leg Spanish Cup game against Valencia.

In his account of Mourinho’s three years at Real, Spanish journalist Diego Torres also paints a picture of unrest in his book ‘The Special One’.

He describes one outburst from Mourinho with the Portuguese coach telling Ronaldo: “You complain that we play defensively. But do you know why we play this way? For you. Because you don’t want to defend or cover the wings.”

Elsewhere Mourinho says: “I have to look after you because you’re my brother’s brother, and when someone is their brother’s brother, that makes them a brother as well.”

After the row which had taken place in front of the entire squad a confused Kaka asked teammates: “Who is his brother?”

Gonzalo Higuaín had to put the Brazilian straight: “The brother is Jorge Mendes.”

The super-agent that both men still share will be another vital ingredient if Juventus end up opting for Mourinho. That and Ronaldo’s sense of better the devil you know, especially when he shares his hunger for success.

If the prospect of not paying a release clause and the temptation of taking the last man to win a treble in Italy — among 25 trophies — is not enough, maybe Ronaldo’s vote will swing things Mourinho’s way in Turin.