The Special One: The Dark Side of Jose Mourinho (13 page)

The word ‘rationalise’ soon became fixed in the minds of the players. During the game, if the coach saw a midfielder such as Khedira or a winger such as Di María go up the pitch, but then – exhausted by the effort – was unable to get back, Mourinho would be off the bench like a shot, shouting, ‘What did I say?’

Mourinho granted freedom of movement to attacks so long as they ended successfully. If they failed he would curse those who had dared set them up. This attitude began to condition players to stay out of trouble, over the years developing reflexes and automatic behaviour patterns. When in doubt Mourinho’s players did not try to take opponents on, did not play a pass, repressed any desire to elaborate. They just got rid of the ball.

Mourinho did not even calm down when Madrid thrashed other teams. He had great difficulty maintaining a good mood during games, and his levels of extreme stress would often turn into what seemed like sheer terror. At the bottom of his sliding scale of fearful situations he ranked losing possession while coming out of defence with the ball; then came one-on-ones between rival attackers and his own defenders; and finally, at the top, the one-on-one with his goalkeeper. The care that was put in to warn everyone that they must never forget about their opponents can be shown by one of his most persistent slogans, three words that the squad believed created the closest thing to a conditioned reflex:

‘Watch your back!’

The return of the
trivote
was a sign of things to come: Casillas, Ramos, Pepe, Carvalho, Marcelo, Lass, Alonso, Khedira, Özil, Benzema and Ronaldo. Before the game, in the dressing room of the Calderón, Mourinho’s assistants followed the protocol of such occasions. The state-of-the-art projector was installed and connected to a laptop, and the lights were dimmed. On-screen graphics reproduced Atlético’s most typical movements and, with animated simulations, it was explained how best to counter them. Armed with a remote control and a laser pointer, Mourinho indicated a sign in the middle of the projection: it was a virtual Alonso, who when necessary moved between the central defenders as a fifth defender. He asked Lass and Khedira to press in midfield, squeezing Mario Suárez and Tiago. Behind them, Alonso would monitor Forlan and block him if he dropped into his zone. Mourinho warned that if Reyes dropped deep to receive the ball, it was up to Khedira or Lass to mark him, depending on whether he moved to the left or right.

‘Be very careful, because if they score the first goal they will win the game,’ he insisted.

Having outlined his defensive message, Mourinho moved on to the attack. He put his pointer on the Alonso icon and explained that the Basque should bring the ball out, looking to play it out to the full-back or forward to Benzema and Ronaldo. Then the program reproduced a situation in which Alonso’s path was blocked by Atlético’s players. Mourinho explained that when this happened the central defenders needed to come out with the ball from the back using the full-backs, so that they could play the long ball forward to Benzema. Benzema should receive the ball with his back to goal and look to play in Özil and Ronaldo. If the flanks were also covered, then the defenders should get the ball back to Casillas so he could kick it down the pitch straight to Benzema. The coach said that only Khedira, Özil and Ronaldo should go for the second ball, while Ramos and Marcelo had to ‘rationalise’ their forays forward.

Benzema opened the scoring on 11 minutes and, from the bench, Mourinho instructed Madrid to drop deep. Khedira was told to stop joining in attacks when the ball was played long up to Benzema and Ronaldo. There were now two blocks of players: the keeper and seven men back, with three attackers in front of them. A forward run by Marcelo, who, taking a risk, reached the byline and centred, enabled Özil to score in the 33rd minute.

At the half-time break Mourinho told his team to carry on with the defensive set-up, maintaining lines of cover in their own half and pressing in medium- or low-block. To simplify the attack even further, on 70 minutes he swapped Benzema for Adebayor on the principle that the Togolese striker was better in the air and would be more comfortable receiving long balls from the back. The natural reaction from Atlético was to advance forward into areas of the pitch that Madrid had surrendered. Agüero scored in the 84th minute and Madrid ended up struggling to hang on to the three points. When the players headed for the showers Mourinho seemed on edge and told them to stop shouting:

‘Stop! Shut up! Stop! Stop! When you go out you have to tell the press that we sat back because we were dead on our feet. We were very tired by the scheduling of the matches. So the journalists talk about the match schedules.’

Aware that some of the press might criticise him for using a
trivote
or closing the game down, Mourinho lay down a smokescreen and asked his players to collaborate. Reluctantly, many did. But in the privacy of the dressing room most were convinced that this tactic was the coach’s way of avoiding the shame he felt about playing in such a rudimentary style. The more experienced players said that the sophistication shown by Mourinho in the plans he made to cancel out the opposition vanished when he had to organise the team once they had possession. Without the ball it was difficult to attack.

On 5 April Madrid played Tottenham at the Bernabéu in the first leg of the quarter-finals of the Champions League. The build-up to the game was long and tense. What surprised the staff was the appearance of a new enemy in the long list of enemies: UEFA. In his team-talk before the game Mourinho issued an alarming warning. He said that UEFA were out for reprisals and warned his players to be extremely cautious when they went hard into challenges because referees were under instruction to dish out unduly severe punishments.

The elimination of Tottenham meant everyone’s calendars were now marked in red – inevitable drama loomed. Madrid would play Barcelona four times in three competitions. In the league on 16 April, in the Cup Final on 20 April and in the semi-finals of the Champions League on 27 April and 3 May.

‘Fire, whatever its nature, transforms man into spirit. That is why the shamans are considered masters of fire and become insensitive to contact with the coals. The mastery of fire or incineration is the equivalent to initiation.’

Mircea Eliade,
Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy

The presence of a mole at Real Madrid worried Mourinho so much that between 2011 and 2012 he ordered two sweeps of the hotel where the team stayed to search for hidden microphones. The investigations were unsuccessful. The Sheraton Mirasierra was apparently clean.

The control of information was another thing that deeply exercised Mourinho; he assigned a group of people hired by Gestifute to carry out a daily analysis of everything that the media said about him. Every morning Mourinho received a package containing the summary. His day began at 8 a.m. in his office at Valdebebas, studying videos, articles and broadcasts. He realised that he and his colleagues were not the only sources of the content, and that certain things that were being published did not exactly project an image of infallibility. He began to suspect that there were leaks in his organisation. His anxiety to control everything that reached the outside world – and the realisation that he could not – made him think that there was a mole, or a number of moles, or even that there were hidden microphones recording his conversations.

The proximity of the
clásico
ramped up his sense of suspicion. According to club sources, the growing fear of leaks made Mourinho ask the directors to set up a study of the phone records of players and club employees. Some players were warned about this informally, as it was in their interest to be careful about whom they spoke to on their mobiles. The secrecy, however, did not prevent the boss’s intentions becoming widely known. In fact they were obvious in every training session. The staff suspected that against Barça the coach would drop Özil, use the
trivote
and play with a single striker, although there remained some doubt about what kind of pressing he would demand. Alonso took the lead in the meetings the players held away from the coaching staff. The midfielder said that if they sat too deep Barcelona would destroy them. Equally, if they played with the
trivote
, even though it allowed them to press higher up the pitch, it would be difficult for them to move the ball around. Alonso thought that they had to prepare for what to do when they had possession if they were to have any chance of winning.

At 5 p.m. on 16 April 2011, shortly before Madrid’s home league match against Barcelona, the newspaper
Marca
reported in its online edition that Madrid would play Pepe in midfield, along with Khedira and Alonso. The team selection was unprecedented: Casillas, Ramos, Albiol, Carvalho, Marcelo, Pepe, Khedira, Alonso, Di María, Ronaldo and Benzema.

When they took to the field to warm up, the two teams noticed something unusual underfoot. The grass was long and dry. The groundsmen had carried out perfectly the instructions of Mourinho, who believed this was the way to slow down the rapid movement of the ball that Barcelona needed to develop their game. In the event, Madrid sat deep, defending with order and energy, and Barça tried to control the match rather than hurt their rivals. It ended in a 1–1 draw, the referee awarding two penalties, one scored by Messi, the other by Ronaldo. The Madrid players said that if the grass had been short and wet Albiol would not have needed to bring down Villa in the area. They explained that Busquets’s pass from 50 yards would have gone out of play, but that the longer grass had kept it in and allowed Villa to run on to it.

The 1–1 did not help the home team’s title chances but the crowd applauded their team off with a certain relief, Barça’s last couple of visits having ended with scores of 0–2 and 2–6, and filed out of the stadium reasonably content. Not so Mourinho. He waited for the team in the dressing room before issuing a torrent of accusations and insults that distorted his face until he began to sob loudly:

‘You’re traitors. I asked you not to speak with anyone about the team selection but you’ve betrayed me. It shows that you’re not on my side. You’re sons of bitches. The only friend I have in this dressing room is Granero … and I’m not even sure that I can trust him any more. You’ve left me all on my own. You’re the most treacherous squad I’ve had in my life. Nothing more than sons of bitches.’

Casillas did not wait for the outburst to finish. He pretended that nothing was happening, turned around and went to the shower; he was not the only one who ignored the commotion. But Mourinho was filled with such intense emotion that he grabbed a can of Red Bull and hurled it against the wall. It exploded and drops of the sugary energy drink ran down the faces of those nearest to him. Squatting on the ground – some say he was kneeling – he rattled off a further series of insults, then, getting up, he wiped the tears from his face and announced that he was going to speak with Pérez and Sánchez because they would be able to find the mole. He promised reprisals and also made an analogy between martial law and football:

‘If I’m in Vietnam and I see you laugh at a mate, I’d grab a gun with my own hands and kill you. Now it’s you yourselves who have to look for the one that leaked the line-up.’

Most of the players watched this display with disbelief, caught between embarrassment on the one hand and the fear of losing their jobs or contract on the other. For everyone present it was difficult to work out if what they had seen was a real loss of emotional control or a piece of spontaneous theatre. But they understood that theatrical or not, the threats were serious. The danger was real. By improvisation or calculation, Mourinho had ensured that everyone had been on edge ahead of the league
clásico
. The team had been emotionally stirred up and he had adjusted the final details of his grand tactical plan. All his work, all his energy, the planning of more than nine months, were now focused on one goal: to reach a state of ecstasy in the final of the Copa del Rey in Valencia on 20 April.

Alonso was asked on Madrid’s official TV channel about Mourinho’s work at this, the decisive stage of the season. He replied: ‘In key moments, and for knockout games or finals, you’ve got to know very well how to prepare for matches, and work very hard on the psychological and emotional side. In this respect he knows how to connect with us.’

The day after the league
clásico
, the morning quiet at Valdebebas had been chirpily disturbed by the work of assistant coaches Karanka, Louro and Faria. They’d descended on the players like a flock of birds on to a recently sown field, each to a different group but each with the same message.

Club employees suspected that this type of synchronised choreography was Mourinho’s work. The fitness coach Rui Faria went down one of the corridors and proudly proclaimed:

‘Barcelona are going through many problems. They’re scared shitless by what they saw yesterday. Their mental weakness shows when they have to face us. Today they’ve not slept and the fear will not leave them. We’re going to sit back and wait for them, and we’re going to put one player up front to hold the ball up … their attacks aren’t as quick as ours.’

The players were stand-offish with Rui Faria, all except Granero, who – in agreement – said that he had seen the ‘fear in the eyes’ of the Barça players. The internationals felt that the fitness coach patronised them like a nursery-school teacher and were sure that their rivals had played within themselves. They also understood that when Faria spoke of a striker who would get on the end of all the long balls played out from the back and keep possession he was referring to the plan to put Adebayor in the starting line-up for the cup final. For weeks now, Madrid had been focusing in training on bypassing the midfield with long balls played forward to the strikers. However, in the Mestalla it would not be Adebayor but Ronaldo himself who would be the target man.

The days were filled with impassioned talk until finally 20 April arrived. All of the instructions Mourinho had given before the final in the Mestalla had permeated his players’ minds so deeply that he now ran the risk of being repetitive. He talked about politics, about nationalism, about the inexorable division between the Castilian and Catalan peoples and of the illusion of coincidence. He told them that they had nothing in common with Barça. He knew, he said, because he had lived in Barcelona for many years, and was well aware of the local culture and the education that Catalan children receive. He explained that people like Puyol, Busquets, Xavi and Piqué had been taught from childhood to distance themselves from Spaniards such as Casillas, Ramos and Arbeloa.

He insisted that his players were wrong if they thought they had made friendships with the Barça players over their years together in the Spanish national team. The Barça players were not their friends because they took advantage of this supposed friendship by betraying the Madrid players, trying to snatch their prestige from them through their manipulation of the press. All the media propaganda, he said, favoured Barcelona and stigmatised Madrid. But they, the Madrid players, were not to participate in this charade anymore. They must accept their role as bad guys and should refuse to acknowledge their rivals. Mourinho warned his players that if he saw any of them shaking hands outside of the formalities of the game they would be turning their backs on him – and on their team-mates. Anyone making any such friendly gesture towards the opposition ran the risk of becoming something very much like a traitor.

Mourinho held a separate meeting with the players to discuss the referee, Alberto Undiano Mallenco. He said that they should always go in very hard, closing the Barça players down without too much finesse. He added that they should not worry about being penalised because Spanish referees – and Undiano was no exception – ‘shit themselves’ when it came to Madrid. And if the referee did blow for a foul by Madrid then the players who were closest – Alonso in particular – were to get right in his face, put pressure on him and complain. But the feelings in the team hotel were mixed. Casillas was telling team-mates he was tired of all the ‘politicking’.

‘We can’t play like we did at the Bernabéu,’ he said. ‘I don’t care if it’s Mourinho or Capello or Pellegrini … I just want to win the Copa del Rey, and everyone else can fuck off!’

Before the game Emilio Butragueño, head of institutional relations at Madrid, called his contacts in the Spanish Football Federation at Mourinho’s request to ask the groundsmen not to water the Mestalla pitch. But nothing was doing.

Pinto, Alves, Piqué, Mascherano, Adriano, Xavi, Iniesta, Busquets, Pedro, Messi and Villa lined up for Barça. The Madrid team was made up of Casillas, Arbeloa, Ramos, Carvalho, Marcelo, Pepe, Alonso, Khedira, Özil, Ronaldo and Di María. Of all the decisions Mourinho made that week, possibly the most important was playing Ramos in the middle of the pitch. Ramos had been playing at right-back but more than anyone he felt comfortable directing the defensive line, perhaps because in addition to reading the game so well his distribution from the back was extremely secure. This enabled the Madrid defence to move 20 yards up from their own area, narrowing the space that Pepe, Khedira and Alonso needed to cover to block off Barcelona’s passing channels, and effectively inhibiting Guardiola’s players in their movement.

The match quickly descended into trench warfare. Madrid fought for every inch of the pitch, contesting every ball with exceptional aggression. Barça struggled to find space, and when they did they encountered Casillas. The goalkeeper saved his team with three memorable stops: one from Messi in the 74th minute, another a minute later from Pedro and the third from Iniesta in the 80th minute. The game went to extra-time, in which a towering header from Ronaldo crowned a move started by Marcelo and Di María. The match ended 0–1.

The way Madrid celebrated their victory was rather curious. Ronaldo, seemingly more proud than overjoyed, threw a few glances the way of his team-mates to suggest that he felt vindicated. Casillas wrapped himself in the Spanish flag and raised the cup, overjoyed to have secured his first trophy as Madrid’s first-team captain. But the Barça players were startled that several Madrid players did not acknowledge them. Mascherano and Guardiola were particularly disappointed by the evasive attitude of Alonso. The Argentinian player, who had been friends with the Basque when they were both at Liverpool, did not understand what was going on. Something similar happened between Villa and Arbeloa, jeopardising their emerging friendship.

Iniesta told a friend that during the April
clásicos
there were times when his international team-mates on the Madrid side behaved as if they did not know him, as if they had become different people. They avoided looking him in the eyes so they did not have to say hello.

Someone said that during the final Özil looked like a ballet dancer in the jungle. Playing on the right, loaded with defensive duties, Özil was more concerned with tracking Adriano than attacking, and because of the
trivote
he finished up lost in the scrub. Replaced by Adebayor on 71 minutes without having contributing anything important, his team-mates say he was so upset with himself that he barely joined in the celebrations. The German suspected that Mourinho did not quite trust him because he was not a Mendes player, that hardcore group that the rest of the squad called ‘
los suyos
’ (‘theirs’ or ‘their own’). As one Spanish player said, ‘Özil is the least “theirs” of “theirs”.’

Although after the medals ceremony, in the dressing room, Mourinho was surly and seemingly dissatisfied, by the time he caught the plane back to Madrid he was more relaxed. He puffed out his chest in the waiting-halls of Valencia Airport in Manises, repeating, ‘This is football! This is football!’ The final reaffirmed his belief that a very good way of playing football is to give the ball and the initiative to the opposition. Overcoming the Spanish public and players’ resistance to football being played in this manner, especially at Madrid, had been one of his great challenges as a coach and he used the final to gain credibility for his methods. Supportive as ever, Karanka spent the return journey to Madrid maintaining that Barcelona were really not a very competitive team, echoing what Mourinho said: that their status was just an invention of the press.