Jose Mourinho is gone — at least from Chelsea football club. But what an impression he left. The figure of the histrionic, hirsute and handsome man in a grey Armani coat remains etched on our minds.
Let’s get this straight from the outset, I support Arsenal. His leaving is, in a way, liberating; those who have seen Arjen Robben play will admit that football is not just a game: it is an art. Greying intellectuals, coffee cup in hand, at sidewalk cafés could spend a whole day debating the sonnets that his left foot can pen.
Robben is a player who on his day can single-handedly destroy any defence — and I mean any defence. But Robben’s stay at Chelsea was spent more on the hospital bed breathing in penicillin fumes than actually playing. The times that he did, it was usually from the substitute bench.
One always wonders, with regret, how his progress would have been had he gone to Manchester who at the time also wanted him. One assumes he would have thrived. A similar player, perhaps not as gifted — Cristiano Ronaldo — has thrived and is realising his potential at United.
I could go on and on and talk about other players who were fetched at great cost who have similarly gone to waste. Tiago, Joe Cole, Shaun Wright-Phillips, Andriy Shevshenko, Michael Ballack, Asier del Horno and Khalid Bhoularouz have all struggled with their games. Lassana Diara, a France international, was a fringe player in Mourinho’s squad. He has since defected to join the Gallic revolution at Arsenal.
In fact, the muscular Didier Drogba and Michael Essien are the only players Mourinho brought in who have done very well. John Terry, Frank Lampard and Claude Makalele were all brought by Claudio Ranieri. So why are the English mourning?
It may have to do with his off-field antics. If Mourinho does not provide entertainment during the actual match, he certainly does so before and after it. When he went to England, he described himself as “special”. This “specialness” was taken to ridiculous lows in his tiff with Jesualdo Ferreira, Porto’s coach. In a column he wrote for Record Dez, he compared his and Ferreira’s progress.
“One is a coach with a 30-year career, the other with a three-year one. The one with 30 years has never won anything; the one with three years has won a lot. The one who has coached for 30 years has an enormous career; the one with three years has a small career. The one with a 30-year career will be forgotten when he ends it; the one with three could end it right now and he could never be erased from history. This could be the story of a donkey who worked for 30 years but never became a horse.”
Indeed he has won a lot. But the style of play he advocated was so deathly that some commentators would describe it as “so negative it made Nirvana’s I Hate Myself and Want to Die sound like uplifting gospel”.
The entertainment came from the juicy sound bite, the theatrics, the intelligence, the grey Armani coat and the urbane Latino good looks. One can imagine the entertainment value of a sound bite like this to journalists on a slow news day: “It is omelettes and eggs. No eggs — no omelettes! It depends on the quality of the eggs. In the supermarket you have class-one, -two or class-three eggs and some are more expensive than others and some give you better omelettes. So when the class-one eggs are in Waitrose and you cannot go there, you have a problem.”
He was complaining that his team could not be conceivably be expected to beat Rosenborg, a Norwegian side, in the Uefa Champions League without the likes of Lampard, Michael Ballack, Ricardo Carvalho and Drogba.
More importantly, it’s a measure of how football is no longer about the game but about everything else. Talk of him pitching up at Real Madrid or AC Milan is as brainless as it is ahistorical. Those teams drew their appeal from the total football they espoused in their heady days. Mourinho is the antithesis of football.
Somehow you feel football — or, more accurately, the showbiz side of it — has lost an intriguing figure, and wherever it is he pitches up next, one wonders if he is going to be as entertaining as the time he was at Chelsea.
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