A new challenge beckons for the Special One
He was as slow as a wet week and his granny could push him off the ball. He had neither pace nor power but the brain was fast enough. The apprentice quit playing pronto, switched to the managerial side and became Jose Mourinho the self-titled Special One.
He also shed a rake of Christian names in the process, the full title is Jose Mario dos Santos Felix Mourinho.
He will have masterminded his first Real Madrid victory before one could utter that mouthful!
Special One? He has to be. He’s an amazingly successful soccer manager, a masterful spin doctor of the surrounding hype, a dapper enigma on the sidelines of his trade.
Everything he touches seems to turn to silverware at the end of the season. His triumph with Inter at the sweltering Bernabeu in Madrid on Saturday was typical Mourinho. He outwitted a former master, his team went home to Milan in glory, but the Special One will be staying on as the new master of Real Madrid.
More limelight, more glory, more furore over his controversial remarks and style. Champions League victory with a third club next season? With this man about everything seems to be possible. No wonder the media is fascinated with him.
The big managers are an essential element of the excitement surrounding sport.
On that front let us thank God for the blazing lighthouse of Mourinho. Most managers look like nearly obese former footballers with names like ‘Arry and Bert and Louis and Gus in Europe and the gum-blasting Scot whose name I never mention here.
They talk the same talk unceasingly, are highly political and guarded in their comments, and there is not one amongst them flamboyant enough to make a remark like: “I am a winner. I am a special one!” Until Mourinho.
And then he goes on to prove that point season after season. He was the best manager Chelsea ever had in their history. He was the best manager Porto ever had, bringing a financially stretched club far past the parameters of their wildest dreams. Now he has delivered for Inter and takes over Real Madrid.
Beyond doubt the man who was as slow as a snail on the pitch is the swiftest and most lethal operator of all in the technical area where managers rule.
Meanwhile there is egomania over his head like a tarnished halo. His mouth runs away with him often. He has criticised about every other manager in his day apart from Bobby Robson his first mentor and friend. He has fought with immigration officials over the importation of his dogs, with the Czar of Chelsea over internal matters, and he has been fined hundreds of thousands of pounds by the football authorities over intemperate outbursts. Mourinho would not know what it is like to wake up in the morning and not see his name in the headlines. He courts them. He uses the media to his own ends. He speaks Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, French, fluent English and even Catalan.
The one word he knows nothing about in any of those languages is “modesty”. It is not part of his style.
And his managerial style could pose problems for him in the new job. He will be able to cope with that too when the Real fans, who love their football, begin to complain about a strategy which (dramatically against Bayern for example) features the reduction of individuality, a team approach based on a defensive model, and late success in the end through lethal counter-attacking. It might not be pretty – it really isn’t – and it harnesses the truly gifted players to the shafts of a team cart.
But it works and the Special One has the silverware to prove it.
Two views from the final are memorable. His players crowded around him with genuine affection and respect in their celebrations. The kind of full-blooded hugs he got testified to the strength of the bond he can create between himself and the young millionaires who often have egos as gigantic as his own.
The other surprising element of those celebrations was how quickly and quietly he slipped away down the tunnel out of the limelight. It was not in keeping with his usual style.
But then he was probably scouting out the location of his new office in the bowels of the Bernabeu.
* cormac66@hotmail.com
