Deflating the Wenger aura
If the UFC was to go down a different route, away from the tried and trusted formula of calling each other assholes, but still not ruling that prospect out altogether, this might just be the kind of psychodrama they’d come up with.
Wenger v Mourinho. It should be an open-and-shut case of frustration and supremacy. We are dealing here with a man who hasn’t beaten the other in 12 attempts, someone shunted to the shadows since the other slid onto centre stage on his knees.
Mourinho could be custom-engineered to exploit the weaknesses in Wenger’s sides, with his number one credo: the game is won by the team who commits fewer errors.
During his first spell at Stamford Bridge, when he was tiring of comparisons with Arsenal’s style, Mourinho provided a succinct explanation of their differing approaches.
“We are a team adapted to the reality, which is why Arsenal cannot beat Bolton at Bolton and why Chelsea under me have played three matches and got three victories at Bolton with zero goals conceded. For my concept of football, the best football is the football adapted to the circumstances.”
In matches with Wenger, Mourinho’s teams invariably adapt to the reality that Arsenal will make enough mistakes that he need not really worry about the other circumstances; that Chelsea usually have the better players too.
On the face of it, Mourinho should be satisfied with his version of reality. Yet, it’s difficult to assess which of the pair irritates the other more. And we can be reasonably sure that if either envies the other more, Mourinho is that green-eyed monster.
A fortnight ago, he was able to park another of his feuds — the one with the man he calls Mr Pellegrino — for his latest swipe at the manager he once called ‘the voyeur’ and since ‘the specialist in failure’.
“Some clubs and managers cannot win and life goes on, but the guys at Man City — it looks like they’re criminals because they don’t win the league.”
It echoed his comments from last year, before he went out and beat Wenger 6-0. “It’s not possible to have 1,000 matches unless the club is also a fantastic club in the way they support the manager. Especially in the bad moments, especially when the bad moments were quite a lot.”
We have seen Mourinho scowl and take off his medals at moments of great triumph, but perhaps that was the day we saw him at his happiest.
It is difficult to get inside the mind of a man who insists that a pan-European conspiracy continues to dog his every move and restricts his achievements to just the seven national titles and two Champions Leagues.
As he blazes a trail of trophies and insults and recrimination across the continent, perhaps it bugs him that Wenger could have had any of these top jobs, at the clubs with the most money, but turned them all down.
Maybe it’s the peace he craves. Or the peace of mind. Perhaps he’d genuinely relish what he sees Wenger having; a decade of low-pressure downtime to develop players and enjoy his football.
But we have little evidence to suggest Mourinho enjoys football and it’s impossible to see him spend 10 years making things all about his players or his club rather than himself.
So maybe he simply despises Wenger as a loser and can’t understand why he commands so much respect.
Maybe, to make sense of them, we need to stand at a crossroads where both once stood, at one time or another.
“Do you have any regrets?” Wenger was asked, last year, on French TV show Le Club Du Dimanche, as he was escorted through his career in This Is Your Life style.
It was put to him that his old Alsace mentor Max Hild suggested Arsene “could have been a good football player, but was scouted too late”.
Wenger answered: “When you start from where I start and to arrive where I am today, you cannot talk about having regrets. I was very lucky during my life. I had a quality. I worked very hard and I loved what I was doing, so having regrets would not be appropriate. I could have done more and become a better player if I was scouted a little earlier, but it’s part of life.”
Henry Winter of The Daily Telegraph asked Mourinho much the same thing in 2006.
The reply: “I was not a top player, but I could have been better. I was not better because I don’t need football at the time. When I made 18, my birthday gift was a car… My father was a football man and I had money. I had a good life. So I was not the kind of person who was hungry to succeed to change my life.”
Wenger phlegmatic, trusting the fates, seeing the bigger picture, which often seems to be his approach when sending his team out too.
Mourinho betrayed early on, it seems, by a little restlessness, a lack of purpose, but also sowing some seeds of regret that helped him find the hunger later in life to micro-manage every drop of success out of his career. But maybe never seeing that big picture.
Is that what riles him most, around men like Wenger, that he’ll never, no matter what he wins, be afforded the status of a visionary, like another man who got under his skin, Pep Guardiola?
In a week when Diego Simeone bowed tamely, if belligerently, out of Europe, his own focus on the error audit just coming up one shy, we can’t forget that Mourinho, a year ago, made Simeone look like a carefree believer in the fates.
Of course, Mourinho has slipped under Wenger’s skin too. I often think of post-Mourinho Wenger as old Carl Fredricksen from Up, saving prudently all his life for a trip to Paradise Falls, yet constantly tripped up by pressing domestic matters, a leaking roof here, a Nasri transfer request there.
Old Carl lost sight of his vision at times, gave into despair and anger, once clattered a representative of big business as he clung to his old ways. The scene could have been set in a Stamford Bridge technical area.
Eventually Carl Fredricksen took flight. You suspect Arsene is at that point now, the balloons up, over the worst of it, knowing he might never quite reach Paradise Falls, but knowing it’s all about the journey anyway.
Some people are saying he must beat Mourinho this time, to prove this and that, but Wenger has moved beyond musts. Even his detractors have begun to accept that he’s going to see this adventure out to the end regardless. Mourinho? He’d dearly love to deflate a few more balloons, but is likely to adapt to the reality that 0-0 will do just fine. So 0-0 it is.
