HEAVEN SCENT
It’s an amazing feeling to be back. We’ve missed the smell of the green carpet
MOURINHO ON GETTING ROLLING AGAIN
DRIVING back into Spurs’ deserted training ground to set things up ahead of Project Restart made Jose Mourinho feel like Mick Jagger.
Not that daily online meetings with his squad were giving him no satisfaction.
Indeed, it was quite another Rolling Stones track that blared out on the stereo of the car he shared into work with his coaching staff.
“The journey was just a couple of minutes but we would play Living in a Ghost Town because it was what we were experiencing,” said Mourinho. “It’s an amazing feeling for everybody, finally, to be back to the green carpets.We all miss even the smell of it.”
“Life was so beautiful, then we all got locked down,” Jagger pouts midway through the first verse.
Although, with Spurs losing five and drawing one of their final six games before the hiatus, life had been anything but beautiful for Mourinho. He is under pressure to turn that around but believes Spurs can Zoom back up the table after he turned his dressing room into a virtual family to survive the lockdown.
The first move was to set up house with his entire coaching staff so they could continue to function as a unit, while obeying the Government’s “single household only” sharing restrictions.
Then he tried to turn the club’s daily Zoom sessions into an online home from home.
So much so that, at various times, meetings became overrun by a mixture of babies, cats and dogs. “Since the decision to stop training, my intention was to stick together and make the boys feel that we are together,” he said.
“That was more important than the virtual training we were doing. It’s been much more about us as a group, about us as a family, about trying to keep some discipline in our lives. The Zoom session every day, at 10am, meant everybody waking up at the same time, having a little bit of work, finishing the work, then we stayed together online and had a laugh and a conversation. “It was fun. We had dogs, we had cats, we had babies, we had family, we had lots of things going on and it was funny and at the end of a couple of weeks the guys were bringing their kids from the beginning of the session or for the end of the session and it was really fun. “It was a fantastic thing because if you can imagine different players, different houses and some in flats, some in gardens, some in gyms and we had, as a club, to help them have the minimum with conditions. “So we delivered food, we had a nutritionist speaking with them all of the time. “It was very important also to keep mentally healthy and we could all feel that loneliness from staying at home.”
It was fun. We had dogs, we had babies, we had family MOURINHO ON VIDEO TRAINING SESSIONS