Mourinho out to show why he is the ultimate trophy hunter
United manager is more driven than ever to land his 24th piece of silverware, writes
Mourinho, 2007
Asked at his press conference on Friday how significant winning his first trophy as Manchester United manager would be, Jose Mourinho corrected his inquisitor. “A second,” he said, politely but pointedly. “We won the Community Shield, not a major trophy, but a trophy.” As an insight into Mourinho’s mindset, it was telling. To the Portuguese, every competition matters, and as modern football’s ultimate trophy-hunter goes in search of the 24th piece of silverware of an extraordinary 17-year managerial career when United take on Southampton in the EFL Cup final at Wembley this afternoon, it is an attitude that helps to explain his success.
“Jose’s mentality has always been that if you’ve entered a tournament, you should win it,” said Steve Clarke, Mourinho’s assistant during the Portuguese’s first spell in charge of Chelsea. “It didn’t matter what competition he is playing in, the will to win is always there.”
The League Cup carries a special resonance for Mourinho, though, and not simply because an 11th victory in his 12th major cup final today would make him only the third manager after Brian Clough and Sir Alex Ferguson to lift the trophy on four occasions. In Clarke’s eyes, his first taste of silverware in England, following a 3-2 extra-time victory over Liverpool in the 2005 League Cup final, was the catalyst for the crowning glory that would follow a few months later when Mourinho delivered Chelsea’s first league championship for 50 years.
United will not win the title this season but Clarke believes Mourinho will view the prospect of his 10th trophy in English football as a platform from which to channel confidence and ignite the charge for a top-four finish, as well as success in the FA Cup and Europa League.
“He’s always liked the League Cup because it’s a trophy handed out midway through the season and it gives clubs a lift for the league,” he said. “I don’t think he prioritised it, it was just all about winning. When we won it in 2005 it gave us a huge confidence boost, changing the mentality of the club, and it was no surprise to me that we won the league later in the season. Manchester United are still competing for the top four and if Jose can find anything to help with that, the League Cup would be the obvious start.”
Love him or loathe him, rejoice or recoil at the lengths to which he will go to win, Mourinho’s formidable trophy haul across four of Europe’s major leagues – England, Spain, Italy and his native Portugal – makes it easy to understand why Florentino Pérez described him as toda una garantia de exito – a veritable guarantee of success – upon his appointment as Real Madrid coach in 2010.
Even at 54, that insatiable appetite for success has not dimmed one jot and, if anything, what sustains him is the thirst to extract levels from within players that even they did not know existed. Mourinho has worked with some of the greatest players the game has had to offer but he gave the impression on Friday that he could count the number of “natural born winners, people ready to fight every day to win and win and keep winning” on two hands.
“The Zanettis, Lampards, these guys you don’t find every day,” Mourinho said. But even Lampard would admit it took Mourinho to truly reveal the winner in him. “He was the pivotal influence on my career,” the former Chelsea and England midfielder said. “We were in America in pre-season and I’d come off the back of a pretty good tournament at Euro 2004. I was pretty confident but perhaps not as confident as I should have been if I wanted to get to where I wanted to be. So I was having a shower and Jose came over to me and said, ‘You’re the best player in the world’. I was like, ‘Really?’ He said, ‘Yes, you are, but if you really want to be you need to have titles, win medals’. I walked out of the shower thinking, ‘I need to try and show this bloke I’m somewhere around that level’, and I spent my career trying to prove him right.”
John Terry, Mourinho’s captain at Chelsea, recalled that the manager