WHAT REALLY HAPPEN TO JOSE MOURINHO…u can see the logic in this article. pls read.
‘Tears, hugs and two icy handshakes’
Jose
Mourinho’s reign at Chelsea ended emotionally, with warm dressing-room
embraces for 23 of his players - and a cold handshake for Andriy
Shevchenko and skipper John Terry. His departure, though, was a long
time coming. Duncan Castles reports
Sunday September 23, 2007
The Observer
Tuesday,
10pm, home dressing room, Stamford Bridge. Andriy Shevchenko is taking
Michael Essien to task on his performance in the night’s embarrassing
1-1 draw with Rosenborg. The former European footballer of the year
tells Africa’s finest midfielder that he tried to make too many passes
through the centre of the Norwegians’ formation where ‘70 percent of
their players were’. Essien learns he should have been passing to the
wings ‘where they only had 30 percent of their men’.
Not the most insightful of tactical advice, but then these are not the
thoughts of a Ukraine international, they are those of a Russian
billionaire. Standing beside Shevchenko, tactics board in hand, Roman
Abramovich is the man telling Essien how to play football. Shevchenko
is merely there to translate. In another room, attending to the press,
Mourinho is utterly unaware of his employer’s actions.
Tuesday,
7:11pm, the home dressing room. Chelsea’s squad of 18 are called out
for their pre-match warm up. All the players step out for the carefully
prepared drill - except one. John Terry remains sitting where he is.
One of Jose Mourinho’s assistants urges Terry out. Chelsea’s captain
refuses, swears, and, according to an eye witness, says he is upset and
has ‘things on my mind’. Terry is said to be furious after finding out
that Mourinho had been asking in Chelsea’s treatment room whether there
was a medical reason for his perceived loss of form over recent weeks.
The stand-off continues until a team-mate cajoles his friend out on to
the pitch.
The game starts, Chelsea quickly lose a goal at a free
kick as Miika Koppinen stretches ahead of Terry to turn in a near-post
cross. Chelsea go in at half time 1-0 down and Jose Mourinho takes his
captain to task, blaming the defender for the deficit. Terry says
nothing but all his team-mates can see the anger on his face.
The
pair had once been the closest of footballing allies, but within 24
hours Mourinho is no longer Terry’s manager as Chelsea agree to a
£10.5million pay-off to rid themselves of a man they describe as ‘the
most successful manager the club has known’.
‘The relationship
broke down not because of one detail or because of something that
happened at a certain moment. It broke down over a period of time.’ -
Jose Mourinho, 21 September 2007.
To understand how the winner of
two Premier League titles, two League Cups and one FA Cup, a man who
averaged an unprecedented 2.33 points from his 120 Premiership games in
just over three seasons, steadily became persona non grata at the club
he made great, it is necessary to return to the summer of 2005.
‘In
Jose’s first season everything was fine,’ said a Chelsea employee who
suffered the Abramovich guillotine long before the Portuguese. ‘He came
in, he won the title by miles, almost made the Champions League final,
everyone was happy. But then it all began to go wrong. Peter Kenyon
started thinking it was his genius as a chief executive that was
important. Abramovich’s mates were telling him his money had done it
and any half-decent coach would win the league with those resources.
They forgot that the most important man at any club is the manager.’
That
summer, Chelsea poached Tottenham Hotspur’s sporting director Frank
Arnesen at a cost of £5m. Ostensibly recruited to revolutionise the
club’s sub-standard youth ranks, the Dane was actually brought in on
the recommendation of Piet de Visser, a well-known Dutch talent scout
who had advised Abramovich on football matters from his first months as
Chelsea owner.
Arnesen and De Visser, friends and allies from
their time together at Dutch club PSV Eindhoven, steadily worked to
influence Abramovich’s thinking on the first team, and, most
importantly, player recruitment. Along with the agents Soren Lerby,
Vlado Lemeic and Pini Zahavi they sought to steer Abramovich towards
the purchase of certain footballers. Their objective, according to one
source, was ‘to get to Abramovich’s money. To do that they needed power
at the club, needed a manager who would do what they wanted. Mourinho
was not that manager.’
Thus emerged a power struggle in which
Arnesen and others seemed to undermine Mourinho by questioning him at
every opportunity. When Mourinho went to war with Uefa over the actions
of referees they told Abramovich his coach was embarrassing the club.
When Mourinho’s team dourly won key matches by a goal to nil, they told
the owner a better coach would win by more goals and bring him far more
flamboyant football. When a Mourinho signing failed to perform on the
pitch, they told Abramovich that better players could be found
elsewhere.
Within a year, and despite Mourinho’s success in
claiming a second successive Premiership, the manager had lost control
of transfers. In the 2006 summer window, Mourinho asked the board to
buy Samuel Eto’o; they spent a UK record £30m on Shevchenko. Chelsea
sold William Gallas to Arsenal against Mourinho’s wishes, and forced
the £7m Khalid Boulahrouz upon him, while Arnesen compounded the error
of allowing Chelsea’s most effective defender to leave the club by
pulling the plug on the £5m purchase of Micah Richards. Inside a season
Richards was a full England international, while Boulahrouz was
stinking out the reserves until Chelsea paid Sevilla to take him off
their hands.
At least Mourinho could easily leave the Dutch
defender out of the first team. A personal friend of Abramovich’s,
Shevchenko played regardless of his performances, and those were
usually awful. In his first 26 appearances for Chelsea, the Ukrainian
striker scored five goals. His coaches and team-mates often felt as
though Chelsea were playing with 10 men and Mourinho was faced with a
problem - should he leave out the owner’s pal or lose the faith of the
rest of the team?
As January approached, Mourinho asked to be
allowed to sign a new striker. The board refused. Mourinho asked for a
centre-back to cover for Terry, then sidelined with a serious back
problem. The board offered him a choice between Alex, a Brazilian
bought via De Visser and ‘parked’ at PSV for two seasons, and Tal Ben
Haim, a Zahavi client. Mourinho wanted neither.
Worse still,
Chelsea’s manager was instructed to sack one of his assistants and add
the Israeli Avram Grant to his coaching staff. When he refused, the
club descended into open warfare.
Mourinho dropped Shevchenko
from his first team, leaking the story to a national newspaper in an
open challenge to Abramovich to sack him. On an emotional afternoon at
Stamford Bridge the manager first rallied his team around him, then
sent them out to overrun Wigan 4-0. Long before kick-off the Chelsea
supporters were chanting ‘Stand up for the Special One’ through
standing ovation after standing ovation.
An infuriated Abramovich
ceased attending games and instructed his advisors to find a
replacement coach. Mourinho let it be known that he would leave, but
only on payment of the outstanding value of his contract - about £28m
comprising £5.2m per annum for three-and-a-half years and up to £10m in
bonuses. In the meantime he kept winning matches, pushing his
injury-hit squad to within a few games of a remarkable quadruple.
Ultimately
Chelsea won the League Cup and the FA Cup, forcing Abramovich to
reconcile with his manager. A consciously ‘mellow’ Mourinho promised to
avoid conflict with opposing managers and football authorities,
accepted restrictions on his transfer budget, and reshaped his team in
a more flamboyant 4-4-2 formation. Fatefully, he also acceded to the
appointment of Grant as Chelsea’s director of football.
Though
some in Mourinho’s camp had Grant pinned as a ‘Mossad Spy’ from the
off, the manager attempted to work with him, holding long meetings with
him during the club’s staggeringly positive pre-season US tour and
letting it be known that he welcomed his arrival as a buffer against
Arnesen and route to Abramovich. The early-season optimism, however,
swiftly evaporated.
Grant began calling individual players aside to ask them questions.
‘You
look sad, why?’ ‘How do you feel in this position?’ ‘Is this the best
place for you to play?’ ‘Are we using your abilities well?’ Because
many of them complained about this to Mourinho, the manager decided to
cut back radically on team meetings, the only one this season having
been arranged for the Jewish New Year when Grant had returned to Israel.
While
Grant looked on at training, Shevchenko treated it with disdain. A
morose, lonely figure around the camp, he seemed to show more interest
in improving his golf swing than his shooting. As the first team
prepared for their final pre-season friendly against Danish side
Brondby, Shevchenko declared himself unfit with a back problem. A 2-0
victory ensured the £121,000-a-week striker was not missed, but
Mourinho was bemused to discover that Shevchenko’s bad back had not
prevented him from enjoying a round of golf at Sunningdale that day.
The
board, though, were not interested and the club’s descent continued.
Other players began to realise what was happening, that the summer’s
peace was a false one, that their manager had no support from the top.
‘The mentality became weaker and weaker,’ said one insider. ‘You could
feel the team’s strength sapping away.’
Mourinho knew his time at
Chelsea was coming to an end. At Uefa’s forum for elite coaches in
Geneva a fortnight ago he allowed Premier League rivals an insight into
his thinking. ‘Mourinho said he loved Chelsea and he loved English
football, but thought he would not stay for long,’ said one coach. ‘One
of us asked him why. He wouldn’t answer, but it was obvious something
was seriously wrong.’
His next Champions League match brought the
end. On Wednesday afternoon the board asked Mourinho to resign, citing
his handling of Shevchenko, his attitude to authority and, crucially,
his relationship with Terry as reasons why he should go. Mourinho
refused to walk, and fought only to maximise his pay-off as Chelsea
apparently threatened to call club employees to testify against him at
any employment tribunal.
A £10.5m pay-off was agreed and the
following morning Mourinho made a final trip to the training centre at
Cobham to pick up his possessions and say goodbye to his squad. There
was a message in each farewell. For most there was a Latin embrace and
warm words of thanks. For Didier Drogba and Frank Lampard the emotions
were so strong that both men were reduced to tears, Lampard retreating
to the shower room in an attempt to hide his. For Shevchenko and Terry
there was nothing but a handshake that, in the words of one observer,
could have ‘frozen a mug of tea’. No one was in any doubt about who he
considered the true captains of his team.
Out with the old, in
with the new. Furious at Mourinho’s dismissal, senior players describe
Grant’s appointment as ‘a disgrace’. Some at Cobham call him ‘an idiot’
and describe his coaching techniques as ‘25 years behind the times’.
Abramovich pushes the Israeli around ‘without a hint of respect’.
Former
academy coach Brendan Rogers has been drafted in to help out with the
first team, a promotion that may not be unconnected to the one-on-one
training sessions he gave Abramovich’s son. Only in Steve Clarke is
there the level of football knowledge to deal with a squad full of
international superstars. As the sole survivor of Mourinho’s cadre of
four assistant managers, the Scotsman has an unenviable task.
But
then neither he nor Grant will be picking the team. As Michael Essien
discovered on Tuesday night, the new manager of Chelsea is also the
owner.
