MADDEST TIMES IN TURKEY
MOURINHO ARE MISUNDERSTOOD
well and he has confidence. Now, 90 per cent of our 25-year-olds speak English and we have fantastic doctors, architects and engineers. The image of the country has changed.” Swansea lost 4-0 at home to United in August and 2-0 in the Carabao Cup in October, but that was before the arrival of Carvalhal – and he is ready for the last laugh on Mourinho. “It will be an interesting game at Manchester United,” he said. “But it will be one of our hardest games. I am sure we will talk, absolutely. He will smile and make some jokes to me, in private. He likes to do that and he’s a funny guy. “But there is no cooperative feeling among Portuguese managers. It’s not in our culture. We tend not to share our secrets.” TELL Carlos Carvalhal he’s got it tough trying to keep Swansea City in the Premier League and he’ll give a one-word reply that begins with B and ends with an S... Besiktas. Carlos Augusto Soares da Costa Faria Carvalhal had already gone through 13 clubs when he arrived in Istanbul, but it was at Besiktas, in 2011, where he learned how to manage. “It wasn’t easy,” Carvalhal recalled. “It was a different language in a different country, working with a staff that wasn’t mine, the previous manager was put in jail, the club was without a board and no one had been paid for four months. “I could write a book about my time in Istanbul, even though I was there only one season.” Carvalhal entered the madness of Turkish football at its most insane. A match-fixing crisis had erupted and Besiktas manager Tayfur Havutcu was thrown in prison. It got crazier, since Havutcu was allowed to carry on running the club from his cell and Carvalhal was told he would hand back firstteam duties at the end of the season. “When I arrived there, nobody knew me, even though I’d been at Sporting Lisbon. They thought, ‘Who is this guy?’. I tried to bring my own assistants, but it was not possible. I was there alone, except for the assistants to the manager, who was in jail. “I started doing my job and we won some games and then did fantastically in the Europa League. We won the group stage, the first time a Turkish team had. That was the moment when the fans started to scream my name. “Everywhere I went, they would give me flowers. There was one night-game where a guy stopped his car in front of the team bus, then threw the keys away, just so that hundreds of fans could bang on the windows and cheer.” The Europa League run included a 5-1 victory over Maccabi Tel Aviv, after which it was suggested to Carvalhal that Mossad, the Israeli secret service, might have been displeased by the outcome. “That was a bit scary,” he said. “But I loved my time in Turkey. It taught me so much. “Not being paid our salaries was a problem, but it was a massive club, so myself and the players stayed because we respected the fans.” His time looked to be up when Havutcu was released before the end of the campaign, but Besiktas stuck with their new man. “I had a lot of credit from the good results, so they decided they could not sack me. “The fans liked me and were singing my name and I was able to finish the season.”