Yes, Jose’s a winner but we’re tired of this narcissist
LIKE some footsore wanderer, beset by vagabonds, Jose Mourinho stands at the crossroads, looking for the path that will be his salvation. In vain, alas. One sign reads ‘disgrace’, the other ‘despair’. And both lead, as night follows day, to ‘dismissal’.
Charged yesterday by the FA for misconduct, following his latest acts of petulance on Saturday, when Chelsea lost their fifth league match of this wretched season at West Ham, Mourinho is once again wearing a face longer than a day without breakfast. It appears, from his extraordinary behaviour in the past three months, that he wants to be released from his bondage at Stamford Bridge, and it shouldn’t be long before his wish is granted.
Will angels pluck a thousand harps to send him on his way? Will the tears of loyal supporters run like rivers along Fulham Road? Hardly. It has been clear for some time that many Chelsea fans find his narcissism as tiresome as the rest of us. When he goes, next week, next month, next year, it will be with everybody’s blessing.
Harsh, you say? Not harsh enough. In terms of pots won, Mourinho has been a remarkably successful manager. Nobody can take those titles away from him, and nobody ever will. Yet, apart from the supporters of Porto, Chelsea, Inter Milan and Real Madrid, who can say, hand on heart, that the teams he has sent into the field have raised spirits?
True, football is not just about weaving beautiful patterns. The best teams strive to find a balance between scoring goals and, no less important, keeping the ball out of their own net. When Inter beat Barcelona in the semi-final of the Champions League in 2010, as a prelude to winning the trophy, it was possible to admire the way they had overcome superior players.
Admire, but not love. Mourinho’s teams are not designed to delight, or even entertain. Chelsea’s achievement last year, when they won the Premier League pulling up, was the most bloodless success one can remember. There are some fine players in the team, yet the collective impression they leave is one of joyless competence.
No wonder Sir Bobby Charlton let it be known that Manchester United, our game’s greatest cavaliers, should not touch Mourinho with a bargepole when Sir Alex Ferguson eventually stood down. For, no matter what the bean- counters may tell you, football is indeed the glory game that Danny Blanchflower, that poor romantic, spoke about all those years ago. Glory is not poking opposing coaches in the eye, or berating club doctors in public. It is not picking verbal fights with rival managers, or abusing referees, who make such an easy target. Mourinho is not alone in failing that test, but he does it more often than anybody else, and therefore attracts greater attention.
AND that is what he has always sought: attention. He can on occasions sound plausible. He can even be funny. But he has been treated too cosily too often by journalists who should have held him more rigorously to account. And far too often he has been supported by people within the club, who seem to think that Chelsea should be listed in Debrett’s Peerage.
His minstrel’s song is a solitary one. It says: not you, me. Not the players. Me. Not the game as it could be, when good players join forces with a successful manager. Just me. When he stares into the pool, like Narcissus, he likes what he sees.
But the tune has worn thin. There are few wisps of melody now. Even the players have put down their instruments. And when that happens the dressingroom is usually one man lighter. When Mourinho came to England in 2004 he caught the attention of Brian Clough, who was then in the last months of his life. What would Clough make of him now? Not much, one supposes, which makes it all the more remarkable that the publishers of a forthcoming book about Clough’s years at Nottingham Forest asked Mourinho to write a foreword.
Clough was no angel but the teams he managed never kicked, never argued and never resorted to the kind of antics that, say, Didier Drogba got up to in his master’s service. Compare Mourinho with Clough? A rare jest.
Mourinho has enjoyed a gilded life in football, ever since Bobby Robson, as he then was, took a shine to the dapper Portuguese at Barcelona. He could have done so much for the game had his vanity not unhorsed him. There is such a thing as the spirit of the game, whether or not he knows it, and even in the rapacious world of football it will not be denied.
Besieged by foes, he sits in his bunker, cursing all who would doubt him. But not many people are listening any more. Mourinho, who was never as interesting as some lickspittles imagined, has become a bore.
We are approaching the final act, not with tears but mocking laughter. To borrow from My Fair Lady: ‘Poor Jose, how simply frightful. How humiliating. How delightful’.