The Jose delusion

AS a little break from from the lofty intellectual challenges presented by the Lampard, Gerrard and Cole biographies — surely all worthy candidates for the Boy Booker prize — your correspondent is slumming it this week with scientist Richard Dawkins’ brilliant new defence of atheism, ‘The God Delusion’.

Of course, I only picked it up in the first place because I thought it was a critical biography of Jose Mourinho. Not so. But I suspect that even Dawkins’ compelling and convincing argument for the non-existence of God would do little to undermine Jose’s fervent belief in what he clearly regards as the ultimate authority — himself.

At a Stamford Bridge press conference on Tuesday, Mourinho left no-one in any doubt that the opinions of others made no difference, one way or another, to his conviction that Reading’s Stephen Hunt and deliberately set out to injure Petr Cech in the ugly collision which left the Chelsea keeper with a skull fracture that will keep him out of the game for months.

No matter that many wise observers who have repeatedly studied the incident on video beg to differ. For myself, the absolute worst I could say about it is that the evidence is inconclusive, a position also taken by the FA this week when they announced that Hunt would not face disciplinary action on the grounds that it would be impossible to prove violent intent.

That being the case, there is no reason not to give the benefit of the doubt to Hunt and, indeed, accept as sincere his description of the incident as “a terrible accident”. And the fact that Hunt is a young Irish player has nothing to do with it. Purely on the visual evidence alone, the incident looks like what the Reading player said it was, a freak collision, albeit one with far more serious consequences than normally attends the often fraught business of a goalkeeper and an opponent battling for the ball. And even if Hunt was a bit hyped-up at the start of what was a big game for himself and his club, it hardly makes sense on any level that he would have attempted to ‘do’ Cech with his knee, a part of the footballer’s anatomy which is especially vulnerable to bone-on-bone impact.

But Jose knows better. Jose knows all. Omniscient in his God-like genius, he has looked into the mind of Hunt and detected malice aforethought.

And that’s good enough for him. Damning judgement is duly delivered and a young footballer’s reputation is dragged through the mud.

Trying to be fair to Mourinho, you could understand how he would have been in an emotional state of mind in the immediate aftermath of an incident which, for a time, seemed to put his goalkeeper’s life in peril. But that was on Saturday. By Tuesday, and on the back of encouraging news about Cech’s recovery, you might have hoped Mourinho would be in a more reflective mood.

Some hope. Not only was he standing by every word of his original accusations, he said, but he then ensured even more shock-horror headlines by widening his attack to include the emergency services and Reading football club, claiming that Cech had been left waiting for 30 minutes for an ambulance. Both the football club and the ambulance service have flatly contradicted Mourinho’s time-line of events.

While the row rumbles on, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the Chelsea manager has succumbed to a paranoia born of the fairly widespread antipathy towards his club, its owner and himself. You could understand if every now and then he burst Millwall-like into a chorus of ‘We are Chelsea, no-one likes us, we don’t care’, but when he resorts to railing against perceived malevolent forces out to do his club damage on and off the pitch, he exhausts even the tolerance of those of us who initially welcomed his grandstanding as a refreshing alternative to the stale mind-games of Fergie, Wenger et all.

And that’s a real pity at the end of a week in which Chelsea confounded their critics with a superb performance in beating Barcelona in the Champions’ League. In a display of hunger, commitment, pace and power, Chelsea reflected great credit on their manager’s leadership and tactical nous, as rival boss Frank Rijkaard was forced into increasingly desperate measures in a vain attempt to gain his side a belated foothold in the game.

With the blue flags flying and the atmosphere crackling from first to last, it was a heady night to be at Stamford Bridge and a potent reminder of why Mourinho is the mastermind behind back-to-back English titles. If this kind of form is maintained, he could well be the man to take Chelsea to the very top of the European tree.

Now, if he could only shed the God delusion, there would be more of us willing to share in the adulation.