Ramos jibe exposes more than Mourinho’s Real crisis
His squad is full of airhead jocks who crumble under pressure, and meathead psychos who respond to setbacks by lashing out with sadistic violence.
With this group of dim bulbs, Mourinho must conquer the most intelligent team in football today. This would not be easy even under ideal conditions, but Sunday’s newspapers in Spain showed how far from ideal they are.
The sports daily Marca printed what they alleged to be a word-for-word account of an exchange between Mourinho and Sergio Ramos, the leader of the airhead faction.
Mourinho demanded to know why Ramos hadn’t followed his instructions to mark Puyol on the set-piece that led to Barcelona’s equaliser, scored by the Barca skipper. Ramos retorted that as Mourinho had never played at a high level, he couldn’t possibly understand the sound footballing reasons why, instead of marking Puyol, he had stood there doing nothing.
Of course, Mourinho knows how to organise a defence far better than Ramos ever will, and the few intelligent Real Madrid players know this.
But that’s not really the point. The bigger problem here is that an angry exchange between manager and player found its way verbatim into the media. Real Madrid’s rapid turnover of players and managers already makes it difficult enough to establish solid working relationships without every dressing room row becoming a national talking point.
What Ramos said to Mourinho implies a fundamental lack of respect that will make it hard for the two to work together much longer. But it’s a thought that’s crossed the mind of every player who is being lectured by a manager who hasn’t played at a high level.
Most of them just have the sense to keep it to themselves.
Unfortunately for Ramos the likelihood is that as coaching becomes more and more professionalised, requiring deeper and more complex specialist knowledge, there will be more and more non-playing coaches like Mourinho and Andre Villas-Boas, men who have dedicated their youth to learning how to be a coach. Ex-players will find it hard to compete with these specialists because they spent their 20s actually playing the game.
