Mourinho should take a leaf out of Fergie’s media guide

YOU could have bet the house on something extraordinary from Jose Mourinho yesterday. A 12-minute soliloquy was within the bounds of expectation because words are his weapon in any kind of crisis. He doesn’t understand, of course, that less is more — although if he only had the humility to listen to others, Sir Alex Ferguson could have told him that. We all know that in the immediate aftermath of defeat, Ferguson would give out dog’s abuse. There was some fairly vicious national stereotyping for Germans and Italians after two particular painful Manchester United defeats. But Ferguson nearly always strolled into his press conference at 9am on the following Friday morning with a smile on his face. It was his way of banishing the clouds and saying, ‘There’s no problem’. In his book Leading, he described advice he received in his early days from a senior Granada TV executive, Paul Doherty. ‘He told me to rub my face before I gave a press conference so that I always appeared bright and cheery and did not betray a hint of tension,’ related Ferguson. ‘He said, “Go in there emotionless, with no expression on your face. If you are as straight as a die it will always kill them. They are always looking for a weakness”.’ It didn’t always happen, but it usually did when storm clouds were above. Ferguson could rapidly move on. He was wiser than Mourinho and less self-obsessed. He saw the bigger picture.