The Special One: The Dark Side of Jose Mourinho (7 page)

‘I’m concerned about not turning so much attacking football and chances into goals,’ he said. ‘It’s not normal to need so many opportunities. If from six chances we score two or three goals, then OK … But this has been happening from the first game. It was like this against Mallorca, Osasuna … And now against Levante we had some big opportunities but didn’t take them.’

In the draw for the knockout stages of the Copa del Rey, Madrid again found themselves up against Levante. The first leg was played at the Bernabéu on 22 December. If Mourinho had shown signs of nervousness in September, three months later he was bordering on neurotic. After the 5–0 rout suffered against Barcelona at the Camp Nou on 29 November he had embarked on a flurry of team-talks and training sessions that kept the team on constant alert. The preparation for matches had become a continual source of surprise for the squad; the resources drawn on by the coach to motivate the players amazed them and the close proximity of Christmas provided new ammunition to fire up the team. In the dressing room the players interpreted Mourinho’s preparations as his revenge for the two points they had dropped in the league.

Taking advantage of the fact that it was the last game of 2010, Mourinho promised to prolong the Christmas holidays in proportion to the number of goals put past their opponents. To complete the message, he named most of his first team: Casillas, Lass, Pepe, Albiol, Marcelo, Alonso, Granero, Di María, Özil, Ronaldo and Benzema all started. The pre-match team-talk was a masterpiece of motivation. Even the most sceptical of players took to the pitch like men possessed.

Benzema, Özil, Benzema, Ronaldo, Benzema, Ronaldo, Ronaldo and Pedro León scored in that order from the fifth minute to the ninetieth to deliver a historic win: 8–0. The process was painful for the Levante players. Some said that Di María, Marcelo, Özil and Pepe had openly mocked them, repeating the phrase ‘Don’t touch the shirt. You’ll make it dirty,’ which to the ears of the visiting players sounded like a rehearsed insult. Nobody at Madrid would acknowledged this to be true, but the accusations were never officially denied.

‘We were a little annoyed that when they had already scored six goals, the seventh and eighth were celebrated with such enthusiasm,’ recalls Iborra, although those involved in the game itself were not so aware of this. But the watching Levante directors were amazed by the public reaction in the stadium. The Bernabéu, as electrified as the players, celebrated the thrashing and called for Levante to be relegated with the familiar chant: ‘To the Second! To the Second …’

‘I’m very happy with the attitude of my team,’ Mourinho said in the press room with uncharacteristic serenity. ‘I’m happy with the way the year ended. A 2010 that for me, personally, has been fantastic. It’s ended in the best way possible. And also for us – because we played 25 official matches, we won 20, we drew four, and we lost one [the 5–0 against Barcelona] … It’s a very nice record.’

‘I didn’t know that Madrid were that annoyed by Levante,’ confessed their perplexed coach Luis García. ‘We’re a small club but with big values. I’d like it to be remembered that a team with a budget of €450 million drew against one with the most limited budget in the division. Thanks to that point we’re out of the relegation zone and they’re not leaders.’

Madrid were through to the next round but in the Levante dressing room there remained a prevailing feeling of humiliation. Luis García had given the result up and rested Robusté, Xavi Torres, Javi Venta, Juanlu and Ballesteros.

The game was played on Thursday 6 January. Mourinho watched Madrid concede two goals before the final whistle. It was the team’s second defeat of the season, after the 5–0 at the Camp Nou. The aggregate result, however, assured Madrid of a spot in the quarter-finals of the cup.

It was all Levante could do to finish the season in 14th position. Not many teams are better prepared for the annual routine of resistance. It is hard to imagine a club any further removed from Madrid. Their matches played against each other in the league are sporadic clashes that, rather than cranking up any fierce rivalry, have historically served to cement a sense of fraternity. Most of the Levante directors are
Madridistas
. The family of Vicente Boluda, a former president of Madrid, comes from a long line of Levante directors. As with many provincial clubs, fans’ sentiments are split. The older supporters remember with admiration the visits of the Madrid team of Di Stéfano in the sixties. They were festive occasions. The matches were held at the Mestalla to maximise the size of the crowd, and fans mixed in an atmosphere of brotherhood.

‘We’ve only spent a few years in the first division and people want to follow a team that fights for titles, wins leagues and Champions Leagues,’ says Vicente Iborra. ‘Many Levante fans also follow Madrid or Barça because, after all, they’re the biggest clubs in Spain – and supporting nearby Valencia is out of the question. When they come here to play, the ground is invariably full of people backing those teams. We have no choice but to accept it and play well on the pitch to increase our own support base.’

Madrid returned to the Ciutat de Valencía to play the fourth game of the 2011–12 season on 18 September. They lost 1–0 in what was another heated match. With new coach Juan Ignacio Martínez in charge, Levante refined the approach they had taken the previous year.

‘We knew that if we went after them they’d be better than us both physically and in terms of quality,’ recalls Iborra. ‘We tried to deny them space because we knew that on the counter-attack – and especially in one-on-one situations – they’re the best team out there. We tried to stay very close together on the pitch, help each other, be very committed and take our chances. Fortunately, it went well. We were able to beat them, and other teams realised that if you play them on their terms then you lose 99 per cent of the time. It’s an intelligent way to play them. Don’t allow them space, until they end up feeling uncomfortable. Perhaps in that sense Barcelona are a better side; they know how to find the space while in possession, waiting for the opportunity. Madrid don’t, and teams have realised that you can’t allow them space to run into.’

That second stumble against Levante renewed Madrid’s rivalry with them, hardening the grudge held by Mourinho. He kept up the provocation, although he pursued it via other means, employing Pepe to irritate opposing players and prevent them from concentrating on competing during the game. Casillas’s appeal to colleagues in the Levante dressing room to try to end the resentment between the teams had very limited effect. By the time Madrid showed up at the Ciutat de Valencía to play a league match on 11 November 2012, Ballesteros and his team-mates had identified whom they considered to be the Madrid coach’s enforcers. In particular they singled out Pepe, but also Ronaldo, Di María and Coentrão, all represented by Mendes, Mourinho’s agent and friend, calling them ‘Mourinho’s puppets’. In the first minute Navarro went for a loose ball with Ronaldo and gashed his opponent’s eyebrow with his elbow. Ronaldo took it very sportingly; the bleeding was stopped, a bandage was fixed and he began to play football as best he could. He even scored a goal.

Levante lost the game 1–2. After the match the home players say they saw Pepe dancing in the tunnel. ‘It was as if he were dancing the “
jota
”,’ said a witness, referring to a traditional Spanish dance, usually accompanied by castanets. ‘He was yelling, “Take that! Take that! Take that …!”’ When he heard about this, Ballesteros went straight to the dressing room and found Pepe heading for the treatment room. Versions of what happened next are conflicting. The Madrid players say Pepe fought bravely, but the Levante players say their captain grabbed Pepe by the neck with one hand while repeatedly hitting him in the head with the other. When he released him, Pepe ran for cover. ‘Dance now!’ roared Ballesteros. ‘Call your boss to defend you.’

The small medical room quickly filled up with about 30 people. Adán, the Madrid goalkeeper, was the first to intervene on Pepe’s behalf, aided by his team-mates. Soon, all the Levante squad were there. Some Madrid players, like Casillas and Albiol, tried to separate the scuffling players. Others took the opportunity to settle old scores. Ballesteros was going around warning Madrid players, ‘Tell Pepe that today he’s laughed and danced, but in two weeks’ time when you go to Barcelona we’ll be the ones laughing.’ Ballesteros, for his part, denied being part of any fight when he was interviewed by several radio journalists as he left the stadium.

The melée had cooled when Juanfran, Juanlu and Iborra exchanged words with some Madrid players. Someone remembered Mourinho.

‘Do you notice that there’s one person missing here? We’re all killing each other and the one who started it all is nowhere to be seen!’

Barça won 0–4 two match days later on the same stage. Levante turned in a serious and rigorous performance, but there were no over-the-top challenges, the two teams exchanged shirts, and at the end of the game Xavi, Puyol and Iniesta asked the senior Levante players about the situation at the club. As ambassadors observing the basic rules of etiquette, they knew that showing some warmth also made practical sense.

The victory helped Barça consolidate their lead in the table on what was a particularly happy weekend for the team. The day before, on 24 November, Madrid lost 1–0 in Seville against Betis, dropping 11 points behind in the table. It was still a month before Christmas but the league was virtually resolved – and Madrid were facing an unexpected crisis. Ever since Sunday morning, Pérez had been making calls to various figures at different levels of the club, from the offices of the Bernabéu to Valdebebas. He consulted officials, technicians, players, as well as his friends and advisors, people who were not legally tied to Madrid. He asked everyone if they believed sacking Mourinho would solve the problems of a squad that was sinking fast in the league.

The games against Levante – the most unlikely of direct rivals – and the Madrid supporters’ urgent need for success meant that the team’s directors, instead of processing serenely as usual through good times and bad, had responded with all the fervour of a firebrand preacher. Ramón Calderón had behaved in a similar way when he took the stand to celebrate his election as president one hot evening in 2006 in the Plaza de Lima. All around, the talk was of the need to copy Rijkaard’s Barcelona, who had lifted the Champions League a month earlier, and the new president was busy trying to please voters by announcing that the hiring of Fabio Capello would guarantee success. Excited, he proclaimed that in 2007 the fans would go to the Plaza de Cibeles to celebrate winning the league ‘any way we can!’

Calderón did not have any written speech but spoke from his heart. The words read by Pérez the day after he began his third term on 1 June 2009, a week after Guardiola’s Barcelona had won their first Champions League, were unusually melodramatic for an executive who had made modesty and calm his trademark between 2000 and 2006. But in the new era there was no room for formalities.

‘We must recover our dreams, our stability and the time we have lost as soon as we can,’ said the new president. ‘Real Madrid has to leave all doubts behind and tirelessly work towards the lofty goal that should always be present in its spirit – to endeavour at all times to be considered the best club of the 21st century. For this board, contributing to the achievement of that goal will be a real obsession.’

Pérez acknowledged that his strategy had two elements: first, the urgent need to make up lost ground on Barcelona, whom he did not name; second, to act with restraint in order not to harm the club’s heritage.

‘Our club has been – and still is – an essential part of football’s history and therefore we must always set a good example,’ he warned. ‘Do not forget that our reputation and our image are the most precious treasures we have earned over the 107 years of our history.

‘In this club our ethics will always be unyielding,’ he concluded. ‘Solidarity will forever be the basic reference point for our behaviour. The challenge that’s now beginning for all of us is possibly the biggest and toughest we’ve ever taken. But I assure you that we’ll make this Real Madrid a great symbol and an example.’

A year and a half after this pronouncement, and spurred on by the coach he had hired to put an end once and for all to Barça’s dominance, Madrid set forth on a series of riotous confrontations with Levante. ‘It was like Madrid wanted to win any way they could,’ recalled Iborra, ‘because they feared that Barcelona were getting away from them.’

For young Iborra the astonishment was clear. He had grown up in a club in administration and could not conceive of being so passionate about anything other than keeping his job. Barcelona, in any case, pulled away from the field in the 2010–11 season. Perhaps because of the strains of competition and the tensions thereby generated, the breaking of the code of co-existence between the two teams seriously threatened to destroy the majestic image that Real Madrid had maintained for over a century.

‘Machiavelli says that whosoever wants to cheat, will find somebody who allows themselves to be cheated, proving that if there are no more lies, it is not for want of somebody who would believe them, but for the difficulty of finding he who is resolved to lie.’

Lucio V. Mansilla,
An Expedition to the Ranquel Indians

Sunday 28 November 2010, and staying in the hotel Rey Juan Carlos on the Avenida Diagonal in Barcelona is a true believer, a man of unshakeable conviction. A native of Vitoria, pale skinned, with a prominent nose and wavy hair, the man is pleased to be where he is, in this uniform, with this badge, and following the orders of a visionary leader. Aitor Karanka believes in José Mourinho.

The assistant seemed animated by a childlike excitement. With his contralto voice conveying a devout enthusiasm, he confessed his faith to all those on the trip – at the airport, on the bus, in the dining room, in the meeting room, in the glass elevator of the giant hotel hall, as the hours passed that would lead inexorably to the Camp Nou.

‘We’re going to give them a footballing lesson,’ Karanka repeated to his listeners. ‘We’re going to give them a footballing lesson.’

The passion of Mourinho’s assistant contrasted with the scepticism among the Spanish players when the coach met them at 11.00 a.m. on the 29th to give the team-talk before the first
clásico
of the season. The coach was displaying all his usual self-confidence – the body language, the seductive poses – conscious that his talk was merely a way of getting his own players on his side, infusing them with the same mixture of pleasure and fear as in an initiation ritual. One of them joked, ‘He thinks he’s George Clooney!’ While the meeting was going on, nobody spoke. No one commented or questioned anything as Mourinho told them how they were going to ambush Barcelona.

Mourinho asked them to press in what he called ‘low-block’, except at those times when they would go higher up the pitch, pressing in ‘medium-block’ at goal-kicks, throw-ins and attacking corners. He reminded them to maintain ‘medium-block’ only while Barcelona were trying to play the first and second pass. On the third pass they were told to return to their own half. To bear out this approach he showed them a video of a recent game between Barcelona and Villarreal that Barça won 3–1, in which Villarreal could be seen pressing their rivals in their half, trying to ensure that the periods of possession enjoyed by Xavi and the others were short and uncomfortable. The players recall Mourinho being absolutely certain that he had the answer and citing Villarreal as an example of exactly what not to do: ‘Maybe Barcelona think we’re going to press them high up the pitch like those fools from Villarreal …’

For Mourinho, the fundamentals of ‘pressing’ came from the principles – and with the terminology – of Victor Frade, retired Professor at the University of Porto and Director of Methodology at FC Porto. Frade was known by coaches across Europe for creating the ‘tactical periodisation’ method, which took over in importance from the methodologies that had previously dominated team sports until the 90s. Pioneers such as Frade in Portugal and Paco Seirul-lo in Spain concentrated their training session on playing with a ball, dispensing with linear-based, non-ball-playing exercises derived from athletics. The new theorists such as Frade argued that players only get better if you invite them to solve complex problems during a game situation, and not when they are just repeating a mechanical formula on a piece of apparatus. As a coach and driver of this new trend, Juanma Lillo said, ‘If there’s one thing that’s not linear it’s a human being.’

Guardiola and Mourinho drank from the same theoretical spring but their methods were quite different. Guardiola was a virtuoso when it came to organising the attack and defence to the point where they harmonised, as if there were a wholly natural transition between the two. Mourinho’s talent, by contrast, lay in building defensive models. Guardiola built his defence on the way his team organised themselves with the ball; Mourinho built his attack on the way his teams defended. Pressing can be understood as a collective, synchronised movement to win back the ball. It is a defensive exercise that can also be used as an offensive tool if applied in the right places and at the right times.

Mourinho gave lectures on pressing with all the poise of someone who feels they are an innovator in the field. He insisted to his players that possession of the ball does not have value in itself and, if not treated with extreme care, at times can be dangerous. He said that the more resources opposing teams had, the more caution should be shown when moving the ball through the middle of the pitch. ‘The more the ball circulates in midfield, the more likely it is that the other team will dispossess us,’ he could be heard repeating to his players. The saying had a reverse logic – the more the opponent had the ball in midfield, the greater their exposure and vulnerability to well-applied pressure. Using Mourinho’s tactics, Madrid spent many hours practising retreating to create space for the opponent to enter into, as one might lure someone into a deep gorge. The players called these movements ‘decoys’. The opposing team had the ball, moved with it into the space that was offered to them, and when they stepped into the middle of the pitch near the centre circle, the pressure activated by Madrid robbed them of possession and they were hit by a counter-attack. That last part of the strategy was what least worried the coach, who emphasised the need to channel the offensive movement to the flanks if possible, and requested that it be done at speed. More than three passes could pose an unreasonable risk.

Using Frade’s terminology, Mourinho understood that pressing is divided into three categories – low, medium or high – depending on the part of the pitch in which it is applied. The low-block consisted of putting the defensive line and the midfield on the edge of the area. The medium-block was practised 60 feet further forward. The high-block meant putting the defensive line on the edge of the centre-circle, sometimes as far up as the halfway line, the midfielders pressing the opponent’s half. For Mourinho, the high-block was the climax of attacking football. The team regularly used it for opposition throw-ins in the opposing half, and for attacking corners. He also used it frequently in emergency situations. If time was running out and the team needed a goal, the high-block was the solution. But against strong opponents, especially against Barcelona, pressing with the high-block was considered a risky and seldom-used tactic.

Casillas, Alonso, Ramos, Albiol and Arbeloa knew Barça better than Mourinho. Not only had they faced Guardiola’s team a few times. They had won a World Cup playing with Xavi, Iniesta, Villa, Busquets, Pedro, Piqué and Puyol, and they understood their way of thinking. They sensed that the best way to hurt them was suffocating them at source, pressing the first pass out from Valdés. Mourinho did not see it like that at all, so among the players there was a sense of fatalism. ‘We’re going to sit back,’ they said. ‘Barça will have control of the ball 20 metres from our goal, and sooner or later …’

Xabi Alonso offered the most incisive analysis, based on an informal meeting with some players at the hotel. At 29 years old, the Basque midfielder was the latest in a line of highly respected players in his family. His father, Periko, had been a midfielder for the national team and Barcelona, and he himself was instrumental in Spain winning the World Cup in South Africa. His experience in the Premier League as an important player for Liverpool in 2005 when they won the Champions League earned him extra credit among his colleagues. Alonso told his team-mates that Mourinho’s vision had lost its relevance months ago. He recalled that in the semi-finals of the Champions League in 2010, when Inter beat Barça, the interfering presence of Ibrahimović in Messi’s space disrupted Barcelona’s ability to play the final pass. Barcelona did not have that problem any more. Alonso observed that Mourinho’s plan could work against the Barça of Ibrahimović, a relatively immobile centre-forward who was easy for central defenders to mark, but Ibrahimović was not playing at the club now and Iniesta had just recovered from a long period of injury that had kept him out of the 2010 semi-final. The mobility of Pedro, Messi and Villa, with Iniesta and Xavi appearing from behind, would leave the defence without a reference point and turn the ‘low-block’ into something close to suicide – Barcelona’s passing options were so multifarious that it would be impossible to close off all routes to goal.

‘Today, we’re going to have to run a lot,’ he said.

At 3 p.m. on 29 November Mourinho gave his fourth pre-match team-talk. He announced that Benzema would play up front on his own and that Ronaldo would move to the right wing, switching positions with Di María, who would become the custodian of Alves on the other flank. Those present say that the instructions directed at Mesut Özil took up much of the meeting, Mourinho always reserving the most complex list of demands for the German midfielder. Not only was he assigned the mission of playing passes to the forwards and arriving in the box himself. He was also given the job of working defensively in three or four areas.

Given that the general plan predisposed Madrid to defend mainly in their own half, there was a risk that the team would be overstretched once their own attacks had broken down. To avoid that, Özil had to be alert so he could stop Piqué coming out with the ball or Busquets and Xavi receiving it, depending on where he found himself on the pitch when Madrid lost possession. In brief, he had to cover the spaces between the defenders and the strikers; he had to be decisive in attack; creative in looking to pick out Benzema and Ronaldo; and, when possession was lost, capable of pressing high up the pitch against whoever was on the ball, before coming back and lining up to assist Alonso and Khedira. These were Özil’s tasks, and nobody else was given such physically demanding and tactically diverse responsibilities by Mourinho.

The success of Inter in the semi-finals of the 2010 Champions League was influenced as much as by events outside of football as by the technical decisions of the two coaches and Mourinho’s conservative tactics. However, Mourinho seemed convinced that the final result was a consequence of his organising genius alone. He simply replayed his old plan, ignoring any new information available to him. As if he had not contemplated the effect of the eruption of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano, forcing Barça to travel by bus to Milan, affecting them physically; as if he did not take into consideration the fact that Iniesta could not play and that his place in the team was taken by Keita – as if Iniesta’s return and Villa’s signing had not changed the nature of Barça, making reassessment necessary. In short, as if he thought Madrid’s players would respond as Inter’s had, giving on the pitch what really proved so decisive in the semi-finals: the desperate self-sacrifice of players who knew they were on the verge of achieving something unique. The Inter players, veterans at the very start of decline, knew that there would be no more shots at glory. The Madrid team was full of inexperienced players, too tender – and too talented – to really put in such a shift against Barça. Mourinho’s contempt for thinking that anything had fundamentally changed was something his own players saw before stepping out on to the Camp Nou pitch to experience what Ricardo Carvalho described to a team-mate as ‘the most embarrassing match of my life’.

In the ninth minute Xavi burst through, lifted the ball above Casillas and scored. In the 14th minute Pedro put away the second. Madrid’s plan was already officially useless.

Wrapped in a black coat and standing under an incessant downpour, Mourinho reorganised his team. He ordered them to press higher up the pitch and swapped the positions of Di María and Ronaldo so they were both coming inside on their stronger foot – as they had been doing all season – because it made them more comfortable when they shot at goal. Until the break, however, the game belonged to Barcelona. On returning to the dressing room the players expected a major intervention from Mourinho, urging them to turn the match around and offering them tactical solutions. But the coach was restrained. His decision to put Lass on in place of Özil was a clear indication that he was more interested in defence than attack.

The overriding feeling in the squad was that no Madrid player was more skilful than Özil. At 22, the young midfielder from Gelsenkirchen was a rare case in the world of elite football, which was defined as much by jealousy, individualism and internal competition as by camaraderie. Özil, who hardly spoke any Spanish but understood everything that was said to him, was admired by his team-mates. In every training session they saw him do things that other players could not do. His controls, his feints, the ease with which he played in confined spaces, his ability to find ways of passing through labyrinthine defences, his excellent touch with both feet – all these made him a player without equal. He had arrived in Spain just four months earlier and had won over the group in a short time. Removing him from the pitch was little more than capitulation. It was Mourinho’s way of admitting the superiority of Barcelona and his inability to offer any sort of solution.

If the players had expected a rousing speech when they went back to the dressing room at the break, all they found was Casillas, close to despair. It was shocking for players who had only been at the club a short time to see the captain, usually so introverted, pleading:

‘Let them see that we’re at least running. Right now there are millions of people watching TV, millions who won’t sleep tonight. At least let them see us running.’

The re-start had a special significance. The decision to line up Lass, Khedira and Alonso in midfield constituted the start of a long – although ultimately failed – experiment. Here was the first sighting of what Mourinho called the ‘high-pressure triangle’. Conceived, as the name suggests, to exert pressure by having players covering more ground, this tactical model worked better without the ball than with it. Once the team had recovered the ball, the pressure was unnecessary but the triangle remained, as an invasive presence, obliging the team to play their passes around the scaffolding of a building in ruins, or to hit longer, higher, less considered passes. The ‘high-pressure triangle’ took 12 minutes to fail, the time it took Villa to put Barcelona 3–0 up.