Larry Ryan: Never mind Spurs, how about saving the soul of Jose Mourinho
Jose Mourinho gestures in frustration as his side forgot the 'basics of life' against Dinamo Zagreb
Peter Drury has never knowingly underplayed matters.
“Tottenham… with 13 minutes to save their souls,” he roared, on BT Sport commentary Thursday night, after Mislav Orsic completed a brilliant hat-trick for Dinamo Zagreb.
Around 13 minutes later, Drury would alliterate eternal damnation. “Tepid Tottenham. Horrible Hotspur.”
It is not easy to pin down the soul of a football club — especially at a time when supporters can’t get near the place. It is entirely possible that Spurs will rediscover their spiritual energy when Harry Kane lifts the Carabao Cup next month in front of fans at Wembley. But there are plenty of Tottenham supporters who would argue that a substantial portion of their soul was mortgaged when they hired Jose Mourinho.
For such a successful man, Jose’s career has been dogged by outrageous misfortune. There’s the international network of administrators, officials and journalists continually undermining and hindering him. And he has consistently encountered sets of morally bankrupt footballers without the fibre to carry out his detailed masterplans.
The end hasn’t arrived yet at Tottenham, but the verdict is in, from Jose at least. His damnation of Spurs’ players must rank up there among his most severe yet, since he asserted they “lacked the basics of life”.
Much was familiar about the Zagreb inquest. We heard how he had given the players fair warning, had them “watch and watch and watch” clips of Orsic. Just as he felt “betrayed”, in his last game as Chelsea boss in 2015, because nobody had heeded his warnings about how Leicester score their goals.
And there was an almost touching fondness for the humility of Dinamo, reminiscent of the wide-eyed admiration for Andy Robertson’s workrate as the axe was about to fall at Old Trafford.
The clear message: Why won’t they run like that for me?
To digress for a moment, what is it about football that seems to attract so many men of supposedly dubious character? Considering we are dealing with a global elite who have shown the fortitude and drive to haul themselves to the top of the world’s only genuine meritocracy, often overcoming outrageous disadvantage, how is it so many of them turn out to be a gutless disgrace when one-nil down away from home? What is it about the grand old game that belatedly exposes these hidden character flaws?
But back to the matter at hand. Why won’t they run for Jose?
Is it existential confusion? Have they watched and watched and watched so many videos of the opposition that they forget to play themselves?
Do they take on board the fearful pre-match warnings, then see the ‘To Dare is to Do’ livery all around them, and become paralysed by soul-searching?
“We had great moments in the past because we could trust the togetherness that was in the team. Today, I’m not sure,” reflected their captain Hugo Lloris.
Can they trust Mourinho, when he’ll so quickly throw them under a parked bus?
In the great infatuation that built around the early part of his stellar career, we constantly heard how Jose was so adept at “taking the pressure off his players”.
All the histrionics and jibes and conspiracies and controvassy — it was all done to lighten the mental load on his boys, we were told. But it’s many years now since anybody voiced that theory.
In contrast, Dinamo boss Zoran Mamic went the extra mile in that regard, finding himself in prison at kickoff.
Maybe Jose is just not connecting with them. Viewers of Amazon’s documentary series were bemused by some of the rudimentary rhetoric on offer. The half-time rallies rarely seemed to offer anything more complicated than ‘lift it, lads’.
The presumption was that the high-level tactical nuances wound up on the cutting room floor. But maybe that’s all there was.
In Jose’s defence, his predecessor at Tottenham seemed to lose them eventually too, despite Mauricio Pochettino keeping a basket of lemons around the place to detect any fluctuations in the club’s ‘universal energy’.
Of course Poch was sold short, Spurs paying the price for failing to invest while he had them in the palm of his hand. There was a pursuit of Bruno Fernandes, who arguably has done more to help Manchester United recover from Jose Mourinho than Ole Gunnar Solskjaer — but Sporting Lisbon’s was another valuation Daniel Levy was reluctant to meet.
Instead Levy saw value in another Portuguese. And it made sense on some levels, including Jose’s ability to antagonise Arsenal. His knowhow would wrap some protective cladding round the energy fields Poch had generated. And even now, any kind of silverware might placate the faithful.
Perhaps the bigger mistake was Mourinho’s. It’s hard to take too much of what he says at face value any more, but Jose has rarely sounded more convincing than when lauding Zagreb’s attitude on Thursday night. For a guy who christened himself ‘special’, he sure is taken by humility.
"Dinamo's attitude I believe is humble. It is desire, motivation, it's pride to prove themselves that they have talent to prove to the world football market.”
And there was a slight deviation from previous bloodlettings such as this — he emphasised again and again this was ‘my team’. Acknowledgement he might be a part, however small, of the problem.
And beyond optics, was that a genuinely wistful moment in the Zagreb dressing room, feeding off their hunger and joy? Rediscovering the basics of life.
Maybe Jose recognises how far he too has drifted from the days when he was football’s great outsider — the PE Teacher, the interpreter who climbed to the top against long odds.
It’s long been clear the challenge he needed was to build something from the ground up. Instead of trying to foist an underdog mentality at the world’s great institutions, he needed a fresh start at a place without notions. Without any slogans to live up to.
Somewhere like Leeds when they were in the Championship would have been perfect — exactly the kind of gig that might have saved his own soul.
Lee Johnson is getting it together at the Stadium of Light, but if the Black Cats don’t go up this year, that might work too. Rousing a sleeping giant with the Louis-Dreyfus billions. And ensuring another season of .
