What do we want from Jose Mourinho?
Jose Mourinho has had an eventful week, but it’s nothing new in what has been a consistently controversial career.
Even by his lofty standards, Jose Mourinho has had an eventful week. It began with an inspiring 2-1 win against Liverpool, continued with an insipid 2-1 loss against Sevilla and has descended, in the days since, into an all-time Mourinho-gasm, culminating in Friday’s pre-FA Cup press conference, in which he spoke uninterrupted for 12 angry minutes, several of which were devoted to a thorough accounting of his club’s many failures (and their cross-town rivals’ many successes) in the years since Sir Alex Ferguson retired.
This being Mourinho, the response has been, well, let’s go with diverse. To some, Mourinho’s fighting talk, his willingness to acknowledge the extent of United’s decline over the past half decade, is a sign he remains the right man for the job, that he’s passionate (and perhaps unhinged) enough to shoulder the burden of turning this rather unwieldy ship around.
To others, the rant was a sign he has, at last, gone off the deep end. This was his “facts” moment, his “I would love it if we beat them” meltdown.
To still others, it was simply disrespectful, an embarrassment to the proud institution for which he’s now the most high-profile spokesman, and to the fans who made the trip to Old Trafford on Wednesday hoping to see some modicum of effort and intensity from their players, big favorites at home against a side who likely won’t even qualify for the Champions League next season.
To even more others, the rant wasn’t about soccer at all; it was the latest psychological battle in what is now a 15-year war between Mourinho and his detractors, real and imagined, in the press and in the stands, hiding under his bed, lurking outside his house, staring back at him in the mirror. Or it was Mourinho the pathological underdog, or the genius Machievel, or the manipulator-in-chief, or it was textbook conversation-framing, an expert refocusing of attention from his players and tactics onto his own mind.
The sheer scope of these reactions is remarkable, if only because they were elicited by a man who has been doing more or less the exact same thing for 15 years. What is it about Mourinho, after all these years watching him refuse to change, that remains so compelling?
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The most flattering answer to that question is that Mourinho embodies the sport’s central tension, the tension between how you play and whether or not you win. Of course Mourinho saying dumb nonsense in press conferences isn’t particularly relevant to the tactical point at the heart of that tension, but insofar as his performances in front of the media are deemed necessary to justify — or divert attention from, or otherwise influence our perception of — his tactical choices, it’s all sufficiently related for us to pretend the conversation is actually interesting, and not more lowest-common-denominator pointlessness.
As this suggests, however, another, less flattering answer is that we’re too dumb and unimaginative to think of anything original to talk about, and so here we are, having the same conversation about Mourinho — for, what, the third, fourth, fifth time this season? — instead of talking about, say, Manchester City, the best side in Premier League history, or Sevilla, who upset the odds to qualify for their first Champions League quarterfinal since the ‘50s, or even Manchester United, who have what suddenly appears a make-or-break FA Cup quarterfinal against Brighton on Saturday, and a manager who may or may not have lost his mind.