JOSE!MOURINHO
When he was a taxi driver...
YOU don’t get a better closeup view of Jose Mourinho than him being your taxi driver for over an hour. It was back when Bobby Robson was managing Porto and Mourinho was his assistant, not even his No2 really, mostly an interpreter.
I was in Porto to interview Robson about his impending move to Barcelona. I’d broken the story in the Daily Express a week before, speaking to Bobby as he was travelling back to Portugal from a meeting with Barca president Josep Nunez in Madrid that had clinched the deal.
Bobby had said ‘why don’t you come out to Porto and we’ll talk about it properly, in depth?’. “Some job, eh?” was his parting shot. But there was a problem. Robson had said I could go on the Porto team coach with him for the traditional end of season charity friendly with a club out in the country.
We could have a chat on the coach, watch the game, have a chat on the way back.
But then he rang. The Porto president wanted to go to the game, Bobby would have to sit next to him on the coach, the chat was off.
“Don’t worry, though,” said Robson. “My assistant’s driving over as well. He’ll meet you, pick you up, take you to the game.” That was Jose Mourinho. He arrived in a little black jeep-type thing. Some chauffeur this.
Mourinho followed the Porto team coach all the way to this little club in the sticks. He was on his mobile phone all the time.
“Vitor”. “Vitor”. “Vitor” was what I kept picking up from Mourinho’s conversation. Then I realised what was happening. Mourinho was ringing Porto goalkeeper Vitor Baia, on the team coach, with the club president a few seats away, to persuade him to sign for Barcelona.
It worked. Baia joined Barca for £4.5m, which would be around £42m at today’s rates. He was on the best goalkeeper’s wages in the world and he won the European Cup Winners’ Cup, the Copa del Rey and was two points short of stopping Real Madrid winning La Liga.
Mourinho, who would best be described as dark-haired, swarthy, in those days, just wouldn’t let go.
He’d obviously been tasked by Robson to speak to Baia and get him to Barcelona. Mourinho succeeded.
After the charity game and back in a hotel in Porto, Robson gave me my story, speaking with great passion about how this was the third time Barca had approached him (He refused to leave Ipswich initially and then wouldn’t leave the England job) and he couldn’t say no again. “One of the greatest clubs in the world. The Nou Camp, Camp Nou as they call it, what a club to be in charge of, eh?” I can hear Robson saying those words now, he was like a grown up schoolboy with his wonderful enthusiasm. Later, when he’d been at Barcelona a few games, I went to see him again. Whether it’s the same now, I don’t know, but the manager’s office at Barcelona was the size of a shoe cupboard. When I asked Bobby what managing Barcelona meant to him, he just said ‘come with me’. We walked through the stadium corridors to the pitch, walked across the pitch to the centre circle, to the centre spot and stood there. This is what it means to me, Robson said, to be in charge of all this. He spread his arms wide, a bit like the Angel of the North, and we both looked up at the sheer-sided stands of the Nou Camp, an awe-inspiring, intimidating place. Mourinho was with Robson for his two years with Barcelona, one season as manager, one season as director of football. He spoke for Robson when he was asked to and watched his back all the time. In that hotel room after the charity game it was well past midnight when Vitor Baia walked in. Mourinho looked at Robson. Bobby turned to me and said ‘I think you should go now’.
Baia, still a Porto player, had arrived to talk about going to Barcelona. I shouldn’t be hearing this.
Mourinho is determined and loyal. In his early days with Robson he was fiercely ambitious, ambition he has redefined with each success, looking for the next one, ambition set a little higher each time.
When Mourinho was at Chelsea the second time round and still coming to terms with what he had found, he exploded after a 3-2 defeat at Stoke just before Christmas 2013.
We were talking in a corridor just outside the press room in the stadium.
Repeatedly, Mourinho had insisted that season that Chelsea were nowhere good enough to win the Premier League (they were to finish third, four points behind champions Man City) and when I asked him why, the volcano erupted.
Mourinho cut reputations of his bigname players to pieces, their attitude. He ridiculed what had gone before he arrived in player recruitment. No prisoners were taken. It was Mourinho uncut.
As this was an unofficial briefing, none of Mourinho’s bloody, wounding quotes were used, but the essence of what he said influenced everything that was written.
Mourinho was clever, making sure that the Press understood that what he was about to say was off the record and he knew he could trust the English media not to break that confidence.
“Can we talk here, just me, you, him, him and him?” Mourinho asked, underlining again that what was about to come was not for direct re-issue. Mour- inho is the closest I have known to Brian Clough. The difference is that Clough would have said all that Mourinho ranted that day in the Stoke corridor – and insisted it was printed.
Both Mourinho and Clough are oneoffs, capable of instilling fear by what they say, pulling out feathers rather than ruffling them, and – this is their true gift – getting players to play to their maximum for them.
When Mourinho went to Real Madrid he found Barcelona, managed by Pep Guardiola, the best club side in the world. Now it’s Mourinho v Guardiola again in Manchester with City regarded as at least one of the best in the world and working on being No1.
Mourinho’s Real Madrid took the Spanish league off Barca. Whose to say he can’t take the English title off City?
He hasn’t got the best players at Man United, but then he didn’t at Real Madrid either compared to what Barca had.
Porto (two league titles), Chelsea (two league titles), Inter Milan (two league titles), Real Madrid (one league title), Chelsea again (one league title) - they have all benefited from the trophies Mourinho has won.
Not bad for an ex-taxi driver.