Actually its worth pasting in here for the lazy posters
Simon Barnes is Britain's best football journalist. You're so SO wrong bash
"I think he [Arsène Wenger] is one of these people who is a voyeur. He likes to watch other people. There are some guys who, when they are at home, have a big telescope to see what happens in other families. He speaks, speaks, speaks about Chelsea"
Mourinho October 2005
Come with me to any lower-division match. You’ll probably get a half-decent football game. You’re a journalist, you write down significant information in your notebook. The home team make lots of chances but convert only one, then get caught on the break. The match ends, but your intrepid information-gathering does not.
You go to a room, generally bare and unloved, and wait. Eventually – always long enough to keep you in your place – the managers come in, one by one. “How did it go, Ron?” “Well, we made lots of chances. But in this league, you get punished if you don’t take them and that’s what happened today.”
And you and your half-dozen colleagues write all this down as if the words were coming from a burning bush. “Were the substitutions tactical, Ron?” “Fresh legs up front.”
Then one of the long, ugly pauses that characterise encounters of this kind, before someone asks: “Any knocks, Ron?”
The experience of watching a football match is not valid until the manager has spoken. Many, if not most newspapers will be deeply unhappy about a match report unless there is a “quote” from the manager. “We’ve got to work hard in training all week. There are no easy solutions in football.” And we write this all down as if it were Analects of Confucius. Is it not surprising that managers get their heads turned?
José Mourinho represents the ultimate triumph of this: The Cult of the Manager. He has done as much as is humanly possible to render the action on the pitch irrelevant. With Chelsea, the story was always the manager. Players, what do they matter? Like Alfred Hitchcock’s actors, they are cattle.
Mourinho was football’s star. His entire career was a sweet revenge on the gods that made him unable to play the game. But he was never interested in football for itself; rather, it was football as a vector for power that enthralled him. That was his strength and ultimately his downfall.
Because the truth of the matter is that, ultimately, football is a game about spontaneity; about fragments of individual brilliance allied to a corporate resolve. If you reduce football to a series of set-plays, you reduce the capacity for surprise and, therefore, the potential for winning.
But Mourinho hated spontaneity. He sought control. He wanted people who only ever crossed on the pedestrian crossing, not realising, or rather, not understanding that a city without jaywalkers is a city without artists.
He didn’t want artists. He didn’t trust them. He liked ordinary talents developed to extraordinary lengths: Terry, Lampard, Makelele, Drogba. These were people he could control, these were players who would not get between the manager and his public.
One club, one star. Le club, c’est moi. Football’s traditional belief is that the team are an extension of the manager’s nature. Why, you may ask, were Chelsea not flamboyant, feisty, cocky, maverick, paradoxical, intermittently brilliant? Because Mourinho is primarily interested in power. The maverick side of his nature is merely the way he set about claiming power, for it is power, not perversity, that defines him.
As a result, the team were in subjection to the manager. This wasn’t a team who cut loose, ever; this wasn’t a team you watched for the sake of this player or that player. You wouldn’t catch Mourinho signing Cristiano Ronaldo or Cesc Fàbregas, talents that need a certain amount of slack in the rope.
Rather, Mourinho put his faith in method and control. Chelsea were effective enough but never reached beyond the brilliantly ordinary. The truly exceptional was always beyond their reach, perhaps beyond Mourinho’s understanding.
How else to explain his failures with Andriy Shevchenko and Michael Ballack? To fail with one might be regarded as a misfortune; to fail with two looks like a personality disorder. A manager who takes on two of the finest players in Europe and gets scarcely anything from either – indeed, seems to delight in their misfortunes – must ask questions not about the players but about himself.
These two players were stars and, as such, they didn’t fit into Mourinho’s plans. They were a threat to him. It was important for him that they failed, and they did. This is heresy: it should be the belief of every coach that anyone of sufficient talent can be accommodated.
Mourinho preferred other methods. They work, too. They worked for Mourinho at FC Porto, where he won the European Cup, and they worked well enough in England to bring two league titles, even if a second European Cup was always beyond him with Chelsea.
But these methods have their drawbacks. The first is that if you rule the exceptional out of your game, you are going to have problems when you encounter the exceptional among your opponents. You have eliminated the element of individual inspiration. In fact, the only place in which individual inspiration was allowed to flourish with Chelsea was with the goalkeeper. Petr Cech’s head injury was the single reason Chelsea failed to win the league title last season.
The other drawback is that your team are going to be less fun. Less fun to watch, less fun to play for. And you can argue all you like that a win is a win and that it doesn’t matter whether you went the pretty way or the ugly way, the fact is that Mourinho found himself in trouble at Chelsea because of a disagreement on the subject of aesthetics. It is true, yet it is not true, that Roman Abramovich, the Chelsea owner, parted company with Mourinho because he was unable and unwilling to deliver football like Barcelona. That was the proximate cause, of course, an ever-growing dissatisfaction with the fact that Chelsea’s highest ambition was to achieve a sustained and brilliant mediocrity.
But the ultimate cause was different. If it hadn’t been aesthetics, it would have been something else. Mourinho established a one-star club, with one man attracting all the attention, making all the stories, setting the agenda, one man as the centre of power, one man as the moving spirit, one man eclipsing all others. It really should have occurred to him that a man who had spent 500 million quid to establish the club as a publicity vehicle for himself may get a little bit irritated by that.
Because the truth is that Mourinho’s power was only ever an illusion. He drew attention to himself, he had the nation’s football press delighting in every pose, every absurdity, every contradiction, but he was never truly in charge of Chelsea. Such power as he had was loaned, not achieved or given.
Mourinho reminds me of the critic in Anthony Powell, whose goal “was to establish finally that the Critic, not the Author, was paramount”. The cult of the manager is designed to promote the idea that the manager, not the player, is paramount and Mourinho’s is the ultimate expression of this cult. And that’s why Mourinho had to go – because the cult is based on a false premise. In the end, the players are the stars.
Jobs for the boy
Where will José Mourinho turn after leaving Chelsea? Bill Edgar examines some of the possibilities, with William Hill supplying the odds on his next job.
Portugal Mourinho has often said that he would like to coach his country’s national team, although he may prefer to seek further glory at club level after departing from Chelsea ahead of schedule. Odds 1-2
Tottenham Hotspur A club with such a long history of underachievement would surely welcome Mourinho with open arms, but would he be willing to join a club where a director of football has a prominent role? Odds 6-1
Barcelona A move to the Nou Camp would be a surprise, even though Mourinho worked there as Bobby Robson’s translator. The Portuguese is disliked for his inflammatory comments before and after Chelsea’s Champions League meetings with the Spanish club, notably in 2005, when he accused Anders Frisk, the referee, of bias towards Barcelona because of an alleged half-time discussion with Frank Rijkaard, their coach. Odds 8-1
Real Madrid A job at the Bernabéu also seems unlikely given that Real recently did exactly what Chelsea have done – parted company with a successful manager because his style was boring. Fabio Capello’s league title last season could not save his job. Odds 10-1
England Mourinho has the ego and single-mindedness to take on “the impossible job” and the post will probably become available this autumn if England fail to reach the European Championship finals. Odds 10-1
FC Porto Having won every trophy on offer to the club, he would probably decline the chance to coach there again, even if he would have the freedom to operate as a dictator. Odds 12-1
Inter Milan Mourinho reportedly spoke to the Italian club this year, but Roberto Mancini should be secure as coach after Inter’s runaway title success last season. Odds 20-1
Arsenal Mourinho may be tempted to seek revenge on Chelsea by taking over one of their main rivals, but the prospects of Arsène Wenger vacating the manager’s chair seem slim. Odds 20-
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If he doesn't beat this team to a title then i am shocked.
