The Special One: The Dark Side of Jose Mourinho (11 page)

Until Mourinho appointed him his own personal priest at Christmas 2010, the players saw in Karanka somebody they could trust. He was then 37 years old, had finished his career not long before, and as a veteran
Madridista
and a former youth-team coach at the Spanish Football Federation had a dignified, familiar air. Alongside Casillas, he had been part of the Madrid team that won the Champions League in Paris in 2000. In time, however, even Casillas would start avoiding him. The once frequent chats at breakfast in the dining room between the Spanish players and Karanka took place less and less. The players saw him take a tray in the free buffet and waited for him to sit at a table so that they could sit at another table far away. All they said to him these days, in the majority of cases, involved the exchange of banal bits of information. It was getting more and more difficult to find a place in Valdebebas sufficiently far from the earshot of potential informers. Distrust rolled in like a mist. At first the players were only suspicious of Mourinho; then they suspected that his assistants were play-acting or responding to other spurious interests; then they felt that club employees were setting traps for them to reveal information. Finally, the players stopped trusting each other.

During the 2010–11 season the various groups were quickly delineated. The faction closest to the coach was composed of Pepe, Khedira, Marcelo, Ronaldo, Özil and Di María. On the other side – and not enjoying the same access, but with occasional contact with Pérez, the president – were Casillas, Ramos, Higuaín, Benzema, Pedro León, Lass and Canales. Between the two, an ambivalent group had formed: Arbeloa, Granero and Xabi Alonso. On a planet apart lived Carvalho, bound to Jorge Mendes. Carvalho was the great patriarch of the Portuguese clan, but he could not take the coach seriously. With the passing of time, and according to changing interests and shifting political forces, the groups exchanged members or fragmented. Mourinho managed to impress the idea upon them that to enjoy his professional regard it was essential to fulfil every one of his precepts. And his precepts determined the style of football the team played.

Considering Barcelona to be the active team, Mourinho had to come up with the correct tactics as the reactive team. Barça’s possession of the ball was the backbone of their organisation, so Madrid identified themselves with the hunter, with the wait, with surrendering possession most of the time and occasionally attacking. The players noticed this tendency from the pre-season tour of Los Angeles, when he would pontificate:

‘Nobody in the history of football has closed down and covered as perfectly as Inter.’

Training sessions began with passing drills and simulations of games on pitches of various sizes. Four against four, six against six, eight against eight, three against two, four against three, etc. – more-or-less standardised exercises to loosen up the muscles with the ball, all at a very high and almost constant tempo. Then came the fine-tuning during the second half of the sessions: cycles of exercises working on pressing, closing down as a unit, and defensive movements co-ordinated so that each player knew when to hold his position and when to leave it so that he could press the ball. The exercises were done together with the so-called fifth defenders, Mourinho’s name for those midfielders and forwards who trained specifically in covering techniques. In this, Di María, for his willingness, obedience and ability to cover so much ground, was the benchmark. Based on these exercises, Mourinho would turn to the tactics board when games came, adapting his tactics to the opposition’s strengths, with the aim of neutralising them.

According to the squad, all of this was the bread and butter of Mourinho’s methodology. In many training sessions he grouped the attacking players as far back as their own penalty area, ‘put in the box’, as they called it, and then rehearsed moving as one to reduce the opposition’s space and launch counter-attacks. These moves would be repeated so as to make them automatic: two touches in midfield, a pass out wide, a cross and a strike at goal; ball to the forward, support from midfield, opening out to the wing, cross and shot … Systematised routines, quick passes through the midfield using multiple lanes: down the right with Di María; down the left with Marcelo and Ronaldo; and right down the middle with Higuaín and Özil.

The players complained that Mourinho tended to reproduce the same configuration over and again. The team trained to counteract imaginary adversaries who wanted the ball and who were prepared to put a lot of players in the opposition’s half. Throughout the entire summer he did not devise a single plan for static attacking. Some players also complained that the drawback of this sort of training was that most teams they would face in the league and in the cup would sit back and wait for them to attack, forcing them to keep hold of the ball for longer in midfield to avoid being predictable and to find space. Very few teams would compete against them with the same weapons as Barça, but Mourinho only seemed to be preparing to play against Barça.

A part of the squad began to think that he was not conveying certain footballing ideas because he actually did not really understand them. But he did not seem bothered by the simplicity of his work in attack. He saw his strength – the key to his success – in the simplicity of his model, and he thought that introducing ideas about positional play and static attacking would complicate training. This was not what had turned him into such a well-regarded coach. He owed his fame and his fortune to his ability to get great results quickly in a range of different countries. Until then, his cocktail of virtues had been enough: his instinct for perceiving the vulnerability of his opponent, his gift of explaining to his players how to organise defensively and then how to counter-attack, and his acute power of persuasion were what made his ideas and his psychological penetration possible. His methods did suffer from important tactical limitations, but they offered a greater chance of rapid and efficient adaptation of both means and men.

As a confirmed winner, Mourinho had another decisive element in his make-up. Madrid had not contracted him to entertain the public with a highly evolved style of football. They had contracted him to stop the advance of Barça. To win. To reach this goal, as far as those in the inner circle of the coach understood it, it was enough just to apply his recipe. His agent, Jorge Mendes, repeated this to Pérez, to José Ángel Sánchez, to his friend Peter Kenyon, Chelsea’s former chief executive, and journalists – ‘José always wins titles. Always. And he’s never had a squad with such quality as he now has at Madrid, so … the normal thing would be that here he wins even more.’

During the summer and autumn of 2010 Mourinho thought he should concentrate on creating defensive order. Everything else would be solved by the abundant talent in his squad and it would be enough that the players got to know each other on the pitch. They remembered him being excited by such a wealth of technique, monitoring the practice matches without shouting out advice about how to create space or pull away from markers. He just gave shouts of encouragement: ‘Spectacular … Touch … Quality …!’

He ordered his team to defend in a certain way, but then, once they had recovered the ball, he told them to distribute it according to their intuition. He wanted to experiment with this idea in the friendly Madrid played in Alicante on 22 August. They lined up in a 4-2-3-1 formation, with Gago and Khedira in midfield, and Di María, Canales and Özil behind Higuaín in attack. To everyone’s surprise, in the dressing room he said that he had come up with a new slogan:

‘Occupy space however you want to.’

Madrid came back in at half-time 1–0 down after a half of complete chaos. Mourinho amazed the players again with a completely different message:

‘This is anarchy. You can’t all just do what you want.’

The simplicity and certainty of the way in which he organised his defence turned into vagueness and confusion on the rare occasions he dedicated any time to practising elaborate attacks. Over time, Mourinho stopped persevering along a path that he neither understood nor was convinced by.

On 20 November 2010 Diego Maradona visited Valdebebas. To a starstruck Mourinho it seemed a good time to leave the training pitch, let the players continue with their exercises and sit alongside the legend. Perhaps allowing himself to be carried away by the commercial value of the moment, he allowed a Real Madrid TV camera team to film the conversation. The film shows the Argentine hero lounging on the bench, his hands in the pockets of his leather jacket, rejoicing at the statements of the coach. Puffed up by the company, Mourinho confesses his principles:

‘I score and I win.’

‘Sure,’ Maradona responds.

‘And another thing – you score and you don’t know if you win!’

If Mourinho’s football philosophy could be summed up in a single aphorism, it would be those 14 words in which he boasted to Maradona: ‘I score and I win, you score and you don’t know if you win.’ I score against you and drop deep to focus on protecting my goal to close down the game. I score and your hopes disappear, because I forget about attacking you unless you make a mistake. And if I don’t score? Only then am I forced to attack, but only gradually, using more and more resources, rationing every advance. What if I still don’t score? Then the limits of a model that fits into one slogan have been reached. The dark side of the theory was not revealed to Maradona, but the players eventually discovered it as winter turned into the spring of 2011 in visits to the Riazor, the Sardinero and the Vicente Calderón.

Madrid‘s line-up at the Riazor on 26 February invited fans to dream of a great attacking display: Casillas, Ramos, Carvalho, Pepe, Marcelo, Lass, Alonso, Kaká, Özil, Ronaldo and Benzema. If these same fans had heard what the coach told the players in the team-talk before the match they would have been confused. Madrid needed to face the matches ahead of them with resolution, in order to regain ground lost to Barcelona, topping the table with 65 points to Madrid’s 60. But in La Coruña Mourinho called for caution. The phrases rained down on the players like a depressing drizzle: ‘Don’t take any risks in defence’, ‘Come out from the back with great caution’ and ‘Don’t be aggressive in attack’. By now the word ‘aggressive’ had only negative connotations. The full-backs applied the handbrake, the ball barely touched the midfield, and the transition from defence to attack, rather than being fast, was just poorly timed. With 25 minutes left Mourinho made changes – Di María for Lass, and Granero for Marcelo – and ordered a charge. But it was too late. The match ended 0–0, with nobody explaining to the players exactly what it was that the coach had feared from Deportivo’s forwards Guardado, Adriano or Riki.

Mourinho waited for the players in the dressing room to ask them to tell the press that the schedule imposed by the TV companies favoured Barca’s recovery between games, while at the same time Madrid were being physically worn down. But after taking a shower, Casillas took the microphone with something quite different in mind. The captain conscientiously expressed his dissatisfaction:

‘We let the first half get away from us. We threw 45 minutes away. The team needs to give much more. We have to be more focused from the start and press a lot more because the league is running away from us.’

Mourinho deeply disliked his players failing to reproduce the soundbites that he prepared for them to give to the media after the match. As he saw that no one had given his account of the game, in his next public appearance he launched a hidden warning to the squad – and to Pérez:

‘There are clubs that have a different communication strategy from ours. Here, I’m the one who comes [out to speak] and I never ask a player to be part of a communication strategy in which the coach is protected. There are other clubs in which players participate very well in a communication strategy, where the coach is protected, calmly playing a different role. Not here. Here it’s me coming out to show my face. Not anymore.’

On 4 March Madrid travelled to Santander, Ronaldo’s absence changing the mood of the trip. Mourinho usually set up the team to channel the attacks to Ronaldo and part of the squad felt that in the Sardinero they would be presented with the chance to prove that they could perform well without their star player.

With all the travelling and the staying at hotels, forced to rest and remain in their rooms, taking siestas and not staying up too late, footballers belong to a profession with more dead time on their hands than any other. These great stretches of inertia lead them to watch reality shows, go on their PlayStations, come up with nicknames and imagine possible conspiracies: Jorge Mendes’s activities in Valdebebas, the fact that Mourinho treated his agent like an unofficial director of football and Ronaldo’s role as standard-bearer of the Gestifute group were a cocktail too obvious not to arouse suspicion.

There was no doubt that Ronaldo enjoyed a unique level of protection, including tactical privileges. He was the only team member whom Mourinho had liberated from defensive duties and this allowed him to excel in attack. Most of the players came to the conclusion that this tactic, which increased the status of the Portuguese striker, had much to do with the common interests that linked Mendes to the coach. In these months, perhaps undeservedly, Ronaldo became a target for those alienated peers of his who felt marginalised by the Portuguese clan. Inspired by the constant frenzy to deify him, the Spanish gave him the satirical nickname
Ansias
, derived from the word ‘
ansioso
’ – anxious.

Wary of Ronaldo’s status, his team-mates decided to put on a show of force in Santander. An official meeting was called in the team hotel the night before the game. The men closest to Mendes – people like Pepe, Di María and Carvalho – did not attend. The dressing-room heavyweights spoke and the majority nodded at the calls for them to be respected by a coach who they felt discriminated against them.

‘Tomorrow, we have to be clear. We have to go all out. If not, Mou will say in the press conference that without
Ansias
we cannot win,’ said one of the players.