A special case

THE Special One eyeing the exit? Say it ain’t so, Jose.

There are, it seems, enough people around only too eager to do the terminal digging — and many are leaning on their shovels in the shadows at Stamford Bridge.

Latest reports of peace in our time are probably exaggerated; it sounds altogether more like a fragile truce.

The proverbial little green man on a flying visit to planet earth would have a job understanding what’s going on in West London. Here, after all, is the architect of back to back title successes, a manager whose team is still in the running for three in a row at home and a first in Europe, yet all the talk is of the clock moving ever closer to doomsday.

Of course, perspective is everything: our little green man has only had to contend with a journey through interstellar space, keeping a wary eye out for meteors, satellites, space debris, lethal doses of radiation, that class of thing. But expose him to just a day or two of the politics, intrigue, egomania, lust for power and money-driven excess of life in one of the Premiership’s top clubs, and he wouldn’t be long phoning home in search of a rescue party.

Strange to think now but there was a time not so long ago when nearly everyone loved Mourinho, specifically on a certain night in Old Trafford in March 2004, when Costinha’s 90th minute goal knocked Manchester United out of the Champions League and Porto’s manager raced into a nation’s affections by bounding up the touchline like the Duracell Bunny.

Back then Jose was the good guy and Fergie was the bad guy — you’ll recall he’d declined to shake Mourinho’s hand after a bad-tempered first leg in which Roy Keane had been sent off. ABU was still the order of the day; ABC was still synonymous with 80s pop.

All is changed now, with Fergie even claiming this week that some Liverpool fans have told him they want to see United win the league. (It’s reported that surgeons are fighting to remove the tongue from the old scoundrel’s cheek).

Meanwhile, Mourinho has leapfrogged everybody into the plum role of Man They Love To Hate, which only makes his recent troubles at the Bridge all the more entertaining for his legions of detractors.

And, to be sure, Mourinho has frequently made it hard for would-be sympathisers to jump to his defence. As if it wasn’t enough that he is good-looking, opinionated and patently not prone to low self-esteem, the charge sheet includes his ill-judged criticism of referee Anders Frisk, calling Arsene Wenger “a voyeur” and, in a particularly mean-spirited act, accusing young Reading player Stephen Hunt of malice aforethought in the collision which left Petr Cech hospitalised with a serious head injury.

But there are also reasons to be grateful for Mourinho’s presence in the Premiership, and not only because his arrival enlivened a plot rendered all too predictable by the increasingly tiresome Fergie-Wenger rivalry which had held centre-stage for too long.

In the midst of the soap opera which is ‘Westenders’, it is easy to underestimate the remarkable job Mourinho has done in steering his side to successive titles and, recent setbacks notwithstanding, once more getting them to the half-way point of the season with the quadruple still up for grabs.

It is only with Abramovich’s meddling in the case of Shevchenko, a boot room power struggle and the loss of key players like Terry and Cech, that Chelsea have run into difficulty.

Left to his own devices, Mourinho was doing perfectly well, thank you very much. Critics can try all they like to attribute Chelsea’s success exclusively to a bottomless well of roubles, but the players in blue never came on like galacticos.

Au contraire, nothing has reflected Mourinho’s essential management philosophy better than the drive, hunger and work ethic which has characterised the best of Chelsea in the last couple of years.

They may only rarely match Arsenal or Man United for the stylish fluency of their play but I suspect even Roy Keane would struggle to find fault with the collective effort which Chelsea bring to nearly every game. It should come as no surprise then that John Terry has come out so explicitly in support of Mourinho; the captain is merely putting into words what the team’s displays on the pitch have been saying for the last couple of years.

A win against Liverpool today could suddenly see Mourinho bathed in sunlight again but, contrarian that he is, there’s every possibility that should Chelsea win the quadruple, the Grand National, Wimbledon and the Six Nations, Jose would still be on his bike at the end of the season.

And if there’s one other reason to bemoan that scenario, it’s because it could see him replaced at the Bridge by one Sven Goran Eriksson, a man who would never dare to call himself ‘The Special One’.

And he’d be right.