Mourinho: Further Anatomy of a Winner
By: Chaitanya Prakash Bapat
Tags: Book Review, Biography, Football, Sports, Books

If the big and financially muscular clubs of the Europe would be likened by Mourinho to Sharks, Real [Madrid] were the Great Whites of the European game.

Deco, slipper as an eel and persistent as a terrier, did the trick for Porto.

Please don’t call me arrogant, because its not true. I think I’m a special one. I’m a champion.

Most fêted coach in the world.

Why so many players who had failed to reach a high level either through injury or for other reasons went on to succeed as coaches?

Mou: More time to study.

While the game’s chosen ones are still playing, the rejects are learning, and increasingly, they are landing the top jobs.

Arrigo Sacchi [AC Milan]: back-to-back UCL

Ottmar Hitzfeld [Bayern & Borrusia] : UCLx2

Rafael Benitez [Liverpool]

Gérard Houllier [Liverpool among others]

By and large, those who employ coaches have come to understand that it’s a specialist job for which the ability to send a crowd into paroxysms of delight with a swivel of your hips is not necessarily the prime qualification.

I didn’t realize you had to have been a horse to be a jockey — Sacchi

To train attacking 10 on 11 to prepare for a time where it’s a must-win game and they need to score with 1 man down [due to red card / injury].

To play silver goal match [15min extra time after 90min; whoever scores wins] by imagining, a game of 2 15min halves where they are losing in the first 15min & now they’ve to score to tie the match. Nowadays, it’s golden goal [30min extra time after 90min]

Thomas Carlyle: Genius is infinite capacity for taking pain

Preparation is fundamental to Mou’s approach. He leaves absolute minimum to chance.

Were the top coaches becoming much of muchness, all preaching the same dogma? No, according to Roxburgh.

Coaches were 3 hats: Selector, Manager, Coach.

When you take over a team, you have to build and maintain 3 teams: the team that is playing, the team that is not playing and the team behind the team.

Crespo was missing, first day at Imperial College training ground. He gave excuses of delayed flights for 2 days. Upon question whether he will settle in with the team, he denied & was loaned to Milan. That’s Mourinho. Crespo out, Didier Drogba from Olympique Marseille in [transfer record 24million euro]

Mourinho’s team

Baltemar Brito joint assistant manager

Steve Clark, joint assistant manager [went on to work with Zola at West Ham and Dalglish at Liverpool] now a manager himself.

Rui Faria, fitness coach [longest serving member in his team]

Silvino Louro, goalkeeping coach

Andre Vilas Boas, assistant coach/scout a.k.a. director of opposition intelligence; a spy.

Just as Robson & van Gaal trust Mourinho, Mourinho trusted Vilas Boas.

If you have a Ferrari and I have a small car to beat you in a race I’ve to break your wheel or put sugar in your tank

At Porto, 4–4–2 without wingers; a tight midfield diamond while playing against UCL teams [Real Madrid/Manchester United].

At Chelsea, he started with 4–4–2 to switch to 4–3–3 once Arjen Robben joined hands with Damien Duff [both very fast wingers; wide players].

What Mourinho’s done is made coaching sexy: David Moyes, Everton, 2005.

Mou: Guided discovery, players must be led gently to lessons rather than told what to do.

Transitions have become crucial to the game. It’s not just the set-plays that can win you games.

No slight, real or imagined, is ever wasted.

Mourinho is the 12th man of the team. In his mind, he’s out there playing with the team. His celebrations are almost never muted; his hugs as tight as a player would give to another player. He’s not a father figure to his players. He’s more like a elder brother or the leader of the group.

Fergie can like you as a person but make a decision that hurts you. Similarly Mou.

Mind-games: the fourth hat

Every conversation Mourinho has is part of his work, and that the ultimate purpose of each of these communications is not to communicate as such but to increase his team’s chances of winning.

Advice to every interviewer of Mourinho then would be same as that to a political interviewer:

Ask yourself: Why is this lying bastard lying to me?

Talking to media is part of the game. When I go to press conference before a game, in my mind the game has already started. When I go to press conference after a game, the game hasn’t finished yet. Or if the game has finished, the next one has already started. — Mou

For Mou: he’d take to mind-games with a keen relish; Rafa Benítez : disdain.

Fortune, like a woman, is friendly to the young, because they show her less respect, they are daring and command her with audacity.

Mourinho & his apparent lack of sense of humor

Porto v Boavisto. Mourinho was banned from the dugout. At half time, someone had managed to smuggle phone in the dressing room and Mou said:

“I’m stuffed. You’re beating Boavisto 1–0 and Brito is twisting the knife. I’m going to be unemployed after the game”

José Mourinho: Zé Mário

Matilde

Tami

Tita

Zuca

Mourinho’s life is typical Portuguese combination of 3 F’s: Family, Football and Fatima (religion)

Brian Clough’s arrived at Nottingham Forest at age 31 from Newcastle United [where he was a player].

Season 2: Promoted to English top flight

Season 3: English Champions

Season 4: European Champions

Something of Brian’s personality in Mourinho: total belief in what he’s doing and the fact that he’s not afraid to voice his opinion

Mourinho can hold your attention. You hang on his words. He says things which are thought-provoking. He avoids clichés. He hasn’t fallen into the slovenly “at the end of the day that’s what it’s all about” mentality.

Ultimate goal: Portuguese national team.

My career as a coach will only make sense, when in few years, I have the opportunity to train the national squad.

Beyond football

Mourninho is interested in human actions; in solving the real problems in Middle East and Africa [not football problems]. While he didn’t like party politics, in that sense, United Nations could be a good fit.

After half a century without championship, Chelsea won two in a row. Mourinho: “Consecutive”.

For Mou, it was 4 in a row. He made you count the pair in Portugal.

Under Mou, there were plenty of cases of substitutes scoring for Chelsea. When a club’s bench regularly contains talent that’s worth more than 50 million euroes, it’s bound to help.

Special one to Specious One

Whether his consistently one-eyed view of events is the result of a genuine taint of paranoia or of calculated use of misinterpretation as a weapon, the effects are bound to be equally tiresome. Hypocrisy is a creature that no amount of meretricious dressing up can make attractive. As Mourinho repeatedly excuses, tacitly or volubly, egregious offences by his players while unleashing a torrent of condemnation on the (often lesser) transgressions of others, as he twists facts mercilessly to suggest that rare unfavourable scorelines for Chelsea aren’t actually defeats, only injustices, his arguments are laughably self-serving. In Barcelona’s UCL victory at Stamford Bridge, he demonstrated yet again that he has become the Specious One. And he is in danger of becoming something worse: a graceless bore.

Television replays are a luxury unavailable to referees.

Times have changed now with VAR in play.

The more successful a man becomes in football, the more lackeys he acquires; the more they fawn the less he has to make sense: Sir Bob Robson alluded to it when he spoke on power.

Wesley Sneijder, at Ballon d’Or ceremony in Zurich: I had pleasure to work with Jose Mourinho, who for me is the best coach in the world.

Zlatan Ibrahimovi: At Inter, with Jose Mourinho, I could go out and kill for him — that was the motivation he gave me.

The only force that is more powerful than steam, electricity or atomic energy is the human will — Albert Einstein

Mou when asked how Madrid overturned the 5–0 loss against Barcelona to win Copa Del Rey that same season.

Spanish game is not Europe’s most impressively led. For years authorities cocked a deaf ear to racial abuse among crowds; also turning blind eye to financial mismanagement [causing unpaid wage issues for many clubs].

Mourinho on his compatriot Ronaldo:

Maybe he thinks he knows everything and the coach can’t improve him anymore

Defeat, as ever, was a bitter pill for the Mourinho regime to swallow.