Mourinho: Further Anatomy of a Winner Page 11

  Among those who have coached teams to European honours after playing careers ranging from the unsung to the barely existent are Arrigo Sacchi, Ottmar Hitzfeld, Rafael Benítez and Gérard Houllier. André Villas-Boas joined Mourinho on the list after following in his footsteps at Porto. Marcello Lippi, Louis van Gaal and Sir Alex Ferguson, though respected professionals in Italy, Holland and Scotland respectively, were never called to represent their countries. Brazil’s triumph in the World Cup of 2002 was overseen by a non-international: Luiz Felipe Scolari. So was Greece’s in the European Championship of 2004: by Otto Rehhagel. And Italy’s coach in the 2006 World Cup was Lippi. Few leading football nations have former star players in charge of their squads. By and large, those who employ coaches are coming to understand that it is a specialist job for which the ability to send a crowd into paroxysms of delight with a swivel of your hips is not necessarily the prime qualification.

  When Roxburgh became Scotland’s coach, he was greeted by ‘Andy Who?’ headlines. Which, given that his entire playing career had taken place in Scotland, right under the headline-writers’ noses, must have been slightly hurtful. But he was in good company. The English newspapers had much the same reaction to Arsène Wenger’s appointment at Arsenal. ‘There is still a public perception,’ said Roxburgh, ‘that in order to be a competent coach you have to have been a famous player. But it’s not always the case. There are many examples of very famous players – wonderful, instinctive players – who were absolutely useless as coaches or managers. Then you have the reverse – people like Arrigo Sacchi. He wasn’t even a professional player.’ Yet he built, at Milan, one of the best club sides in the history of the European game. And then guided Italy to the World Cup final in 1994. When they lost on penalties to a Brazil team supervised by Carlos Alberto Parreira, who had never kicked a ball professionally either. ‘Now I’m not denying that to have been a top player is an advantage,’ Roxburgh continued, ‘if the other attributes are in place.’ As in the cases of, say, Johan Cruyff, or Fabio Capello, a distinguished player with Juventus and Italy who, having succeeded Sacchi at Milan, immediately established himself as an outstanding coach. ‘The top player starts with the experience and the players immediately respect him and listen to him. But it is only a start. Guys like José and, before him, Arrigo Sacchi have had to earn that respect. They’ve had to work even harder than the former star player.’

  Houllier loves to quote Sacchi on this topic. Asked how he could coach without having played, the Italian replied: ‘I didn’t realise you had to have been a horse to be a jockey.’ The functions were completely different, said Houllier: ‘When you are a player, you focus on your career. When you are a coach, you focus on everything. Stuart Pearce was eloquent about it. He said that, when he became a player-manager at Nottingham Forest, it hit him like a revelation.’ It did not put him off permanently, for Pearce, having obtained his qualifications and worked under Kevin Keegan at Manchester City, took responsibility for that club’s fortunes and was later put in charge of the England Under-21s and Great Britain’s team at the 2012 Olympic Games. Maybe Pearce will make the transition. Houllier’s own playing habitat was the French third division and subconsciously, he said, he might have been driven to compensate for unfulfilled dreams by developing the instinct to organise others. Like Mourinho, he was lucky to have paternal guidance. ‘My father was in charge of a local team near Boulogne and showed me how to do things. When I was a player, I started going to analyse the opposition, just for fun mainly, though the coach did find it helpful. José has spoken highly of his father and what he gained through being the son of a coach.’

  Even as he approached the end of his time at university, Mourinho would do the occasional spying stint for his father. Félix, his coaching career having peaked in two spells at Rio Ave – the latter featured an appearance in the Portuguese Cup final, which Porto won 4–1 – began moving from one lower division club to another, usually involuntarily. Still José stayed close to him. But the young Mourinho had to think about earning a living and even then he took a direction that served his future interests well, as Roxburgh explained: ‘He had trained to be a teacher.’ Again Roxburgh, as a former teacher, might be biased, but he insisted there were countless examples of how a teaching background could help to prepare a coach: to name only a couple of the more prominent Dutch ones, Van Gaal and the late, revered Rinus Michels. ‘Rinus would always say his teaching background had been invaluable. After all, teaching is about communication and organisation – and so is coaching. Then, having established that building block in his career, José went to find the next, educating himself in coaching by going on courses like the one he did with us in Scotland. This gave him the global method of training, which he still uses.’ It involves the development of technical, tactical and fitness elements together, through the medium of compressed small-sided games, and, said Roxburgh, had been formulated by the SFA to suit the mentality of Scots, who ‘get easily bored and don’t like drills and things like that’.

  More than a decade later, when Mourinho took charge at Leiria, he surveyed the location for pre-season training with the president, who gazed at the nearby hills and valleys and observed that they would be ideal for running. Mourinho told him to forget the scenery; the players would be running only on the pitch. Did that resonate with Roxburgh? ‘Absolutely. Our mentality was all to do with the pitch. It was portable goals and small-sided games, double-penalty-box games, wingers’ games – an endless stream of games. The players would be learning without realising it. José has, of course, had many influences along the way. But he still has this global view. At Chelsea his fitness trainer, Rui Faria, would rarely work detached from the coaching itself. He would stand beside José and advise him on decisions about when to extend the pitch or widen it, or highlight a certain aspect, or increase the intensity of an exercise, change the speed, make it two-touch or whatever. Everything was done together.’

  Robson introduced him to a different approach. ‘With Bobby,’ said Roxburgh, ‘he could begin to learn like a fly on the wall. Bobby used to give the first period of training to an English fitness coach called Roger Spry, a great guy who had worked in Brazil and was wonderful on movement and so on. Then Bobby would do the tactical stuff. It was perfect for José just to be there and take it all in. In our course for the UEFA pro licence, the most important thing is the practical work. The students must attach themselves to a club for a week and shadow the head coach. Then our tutors go and watch them and help them. José was learning that way week after week, month after month, year after year. I went over once to make a film for UEFA and could see that he was totally integrated in what Bobby was doing. He would have learned a lot about man-management, because Bobby was brilliant at that. Then, at Barcelona, Louis van Gaal moves in. Totally different. While Bobby was what you might call a romantic of the game, Louis is highly structured, very much of the Dutch school. And José gets this whole new education in how to structure a day’s training. Even better, he gets practical experience through being handed the team for matches. At half-time Louis would go into the dressing room with José, not to talk to the players but to listen to what José was telling them. Then later he’d discuss it with him. So now he’d gone way beyond the shadowing phase. He was actually managing a team – Barcelona, remember! It was like the ultimate finishing school.’

  So he went back to Portugal and put it all into effect. Mourinho himself has traced his rise to international prominence back to Porto’s UEFA Cup quarter-final against Panathinaikos in 2003. Having been beaten 1–0 in the home leg, his team had to go to a stadium where the Athens club had never lost in European competition. But one goal from Derlei took the match into extra time and another from the Brazilian striker won it. ‘That changed the mentality of the club,’ said Roxburgh. ‘José felt he’d arrived and he was proved right as Porto went on to beat Celtic in the final.’ After that, Roxburgh had organised a forum of his elite coaches and decided to break with tradition by i
nviting the finalists from the UEFA Cup as well as the Champions League. ‘Both José and Martin O’Neill came and José’s first contribution was amazing. Here he was, the new kid on the block, round the table in our boardroom in Switzerland with the Capellos and Lippis and Fergies and Wengers and all the other stars. ‘One of the first questions was “What do you think of the silver goal?”’ This was the rule whereby, if a knockout match were drawn after ninety minutes and a team led at the end of the first fifteen-minute period of extra time, the second period would be abandoned and the match end then. It has since been scrapped and the two periods of fifteen minutes restored. But Porto had won the UEFA Cup on a silver goal, scored by Derlei in the 115th minute of a final during which Henrik Larsson had twice equalised. ‘There was quite a lot of debate and people like Marcello Lippi said they preferred two times fifteen minutes. José listened to it all. And then he made his contribution. “I thought it was a very, very interesting thing,” he said, “to train my players to cope with that.” He had nothing to say about whether it was a good or a bad rule. To him it was just another challenge. He was asked what he meant. He replied that he had told the players to imagine two different fifteen-minute scenarios. In one they were winning, the other losing. How would they handle it? Because those few minutes might be all they had to win the match. That told me everything about José as a coach. He wasn’t voicing negative opinions about the rule – it was there, and he would train his players to make the most of it.’ Similarly, he has been known to make his players practise attacking with ten against eleven – just in case they ever have a man sent off in a match they need to win.

  A proverb adapted from Thomas Carlyle states that genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains, and while it might not be universally applicable in football, the career of Sir Alex Ferguson certainly evokes it. So do aspects of Mourinho’s career. On the one hand, there is the occasional detractor like my friend who considers him a painter by numbers. On the other, there is a regiment of admirers such as José Manuel Capristano who, when vice-president of Benfica, initially regarded Mourinho as too inexperienced to handle the first team but was won over in a matter of weeks and exclaimed: ‘That man was born to be a coach. I have never met anyone like him in my life. He thinks twenty-four hours a day.’ Or Deco, who has said: ‘Maybe other coaches have the same quality as Mourinho – but nobody works as hard as him.’ Roxburgh recognised that reluctance to leave a stone unturned. ‘I must have said it a thousand times. The guys I deal with, either the national coaches or the top club guys, are obsessed with detail. That’s what makes them different. Louis van Gaal, for example. I remember him coming to one of our meetings – he was at Barcelona with José at the time – and complaining that, in the Champions League, the gap in time between the warm-up and the kick-off was too long. He told me to get it changed. Now, it was only a minute too long, two minutes at the most. But he was insistent. So we changed the countdown. These are tiny details. But they matter to such people. José’s very much like that.’

  Preparation is fundamental to Mourinho’s approach. And writing things down. Anyone watching Sir Alex Ferguson would sense that here was a man who liked to live on the edge, to improvise, to rescue situations with a bold substitution (or two, as in Barcelona in 1999, when Teddy Sheringham and Ole Gunnar Solskjaer turned an impending Champions League final defeat by Bayern Munich into glorious victory). Mourinho leaves the absolute minimum to chance. ‘He does have that instinct for the game,’ said Roxburgh, ‘but he prefers to do as much as possible through preparation. He is also very good – and this would have been honed with Van Gaal – at analysing his own team’s games. José says this. You watch him in the first half of a game. He’s got a little pad and he takes notes. Only in the first half. He doesn’t do it in the second half. Some people like to take notes, others to use little tape recorders. Fergie, incidentally, does neither.’ Ferguson, indeed, is proud of being able to carry everything in his head. ‘He’s got perfect recall,’ said Roxburgh, ‘a photographic brain – that’s why he’s so good at quizzes – but José likes to jot down what he calls his little reminders. By the time he goes in to see his players at half-time, he’s talked to his assistants and got his talk ready so the points he wants to make can be punched out. The reason he doesn’t take notes in the second half is that he’s not going to speak to them at the end. He doesn’t think that works. He prefers to go off and analyse it later.’

  Today, with the aid of technology, coaches exchange information more than ever before. So I asked Roxburgh if, at his forums, he had noticed a certain convergence. Were the top ones becoming much of a muchness, all preaching the same dogma? Or did Mourinho’s achievements mark him out as a man apart? ‘It’s a hard question to answer,’ he said, ‘but I don’t think they are all alike.’ There would always be differences of emphasis. ‘I remember being involved in the tsunami relief match in Barcelona and our dressing room contained an array of talent beyond belief. Everywhere you looked there was a great player. You’d think that, when you get to that level, one would be as good as the other. But they’ve all got their own personalities and specialities. David Beckham is different from Ronaldinho. And they perform at their peak when the environment is right. If you look at coaches, Marcello Lippi’s record proves he is high class – “Lippi’s got us all beat,” Fergie was always in the habit of saying – but when he went to Inter it didn’t work. Different qualities suit different contexts. It’s a matter of chemistry. José Mourinho might not be the right guy for a certain club. Yet they’ve all got the same tools today. They’ve all got these computer systems and analysts and expert advisers all around them. They’ve got psychologists – well, some do and some don’t – and the ability to monitor their players’ fitness. These things are only back-up. It’s how they use the tools, how they relate the information to football players – and that’s such a delicate, fragile relationship.’ So what puts the best above the rest? ‘They wear three hats.’

  Three hats?

  ‘Selector. Coach. Manager.’

  In the past, Roxburgh explained, before the supervision of professional teams became as developed and scientific as it is today, many of the top people were good at selection and management but modest in their knowledge of training methods. ‘Now look at Alex Ferguson or Arsène Wenger or José Mourinho. They wear all three hats and they wear them well. They can select, which means more than just picking and balancing your team. It means deciding which players to buy in order to improve your team. It means choosing your scouts – so your club can choose which players to buy and discover new talent – and the other backroom staff.

  ‘Then there’s the coaching hat, which entails training people to be better and gelling them into a team.

  ‘To get the management hat, you have to be able to handle the players, to maintain discipline and order and so on. Certain people stand out at certain things. Fabio Capello, for instance, is brilliant on discipline. But he definitely has three hats. And there’s no doubt in my mind that José has all three.’ One difference between them, of course, being that while Capello began with a name, Mourinho had to make his. But Roxburgh insists that renders Capello an exception to the rule. ‘I actually think the majority of the top coaches are guys who have had to think, and work at it. Guys who have a sympathy for the learner. The ability to deliver a pass and the ability to deliver a message – these are completely different things.’

  Selection

  José Mourinho always had an eye for a player and a system. Otherwise his scouting reports would not have found such favour with Sir Bobby Robson, let alone satisfied Louis van Gaal, whom even his best friends would consider as fiercely demanding a coach as any on earth. And Mourinho, upon being given the opportunity, wasted little time in using his judgement. While waiting to take over at Leiria, he travelled to Brazil and came back with a couple of players, Derlei and Maciel, paying far less than they proved to be worth. At Porto, he rebuilt quickly, cheaply and to dramatic effect. But C
helsea was a different sort of challenge: the budget was huge and expectations in proportion. And what he was being asked to fix was not exactly broken because Claudio Ranieri had steered the team to second place in the Premier League and the Champions League semi-finals. Mourinho went about it in his usual businesslike way, sending Roman Abramovich, Eugene Tenenbaum (the owner’s right-hand man) and Peter Kenyon a computer presentation with lists of players he wanted to retain, discard or recruit and the infrastructure he required. (Being aware that Chelsea’s scruffy training ground near Heathrow Airport had come to serve as little more than a joke among the players, he was reassured to learn that a sparkling new facility was under construction at Cobham in Surrey and would be in use within weeks.) All was agreed on Abramovich’s yacht.

  Already there were reports that Mourinho would be going back to Porto for three of his European champions, and at his inaugural press briefing in London, I asked if they were true. He shook his head and said there might be one signing from Porto. ‘I don’t need players I know,’ he stressed. Englishmen such as John Terry and Frank Lampard would be relied upon as before. ‘I don’t need to bring in players for protection. When I was at Barcelona with Louis van Gaal, he kept bringing in Dutch players. This is something I don’t want. It shows two things. That you are not so self-confident as you think – it’s like a young boy who goes on holiday with his parents all the time because he is afraid to go on his own. Also that you are not such a good professional if you only know players from your own country.’ It was a stirringly forthright answer: one of many that were to keep us agog through the coming months. Perhaps it would have been less well received, however, if we had realised it was utter piffle. Four of the first seven players Mourinho signed were from Portugal and it would have been five out of eight had he landed Deco, who chose to go to Barcelona instead. Even without Deco, he took two from Porto – Paulo Ferreira and Ricardo Carvalho – as well as Tiago from Benfica and the youngster Nuno Morais from Penafiel. All were represented by his own agent and confidant, Jorge Mendes, so the transfers were hardly bolts from the blue. On this occasion, Mourinho must have been reading from the wrong tin. Or maybe, as a relative newcomer to the world of wheeling and dealing, he made his error through an inadequate grasp of the art of obfuscation. He still has some difficulty (thank goodness) with that.