- Sep 2, 2013
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Gary Doherty ones, to be preciseMrs Mourinho, we are grateful for your insight.
Does he really wear Spurs jimjams?
Etc.
Gary Doherty ones, to be preciseMrs Mourinho, we are grateful for your insight.
Does he really wear Spurs jimjams?
Etc.
Just like the Poch haters ?
Not really... I watched the first half (20 minutes) of our game against Bournemouth at half time I jumped into the pool and didn't bother with the 2nd half..
In 30yrs of supporting Spurs I've never missed a game deliberately. I plan my life around our games and even the wife knows to not try anything differently.
I don't not support Jose' I've come to like his interviews but we all know how this will end....maybe after the Poch stint I don't have the energy of being so close yet so far.
Poch didn't start winning people around until November/December. It took him a few months to identify the players who would suit him. Even then, over the past 5 years there's still been plenty of moaning about in game management, worrying that he's going to leave us, and that in some undefined way he's just not good enough.did that happen after we lost one game with him then? I can’t remember back then.
We might have just dispatched with our Ferguson. United famously nearly pulled the trigger on sacking him, but they didn't and the rest is history. We hit our first bump in the road with Poch and he got the flick. Two wins later, were in 5th and all appears well.Don’t most managerial tenures finish badly? For every Ferguson there are hundreds of managers who are fired or leave under mutual consent because things sour. Even a club legend like Poch went through this.
If we can get three or four good years out of Mourinho, I’d say we’ve done well
We might have just dispatched with our Ferguson. United famously nearly pulled the trigger on sacking him, but they didn't and the rest is history. We hit our first bump in the road with Poch and he got the flick. Two wins later, were in 5th and all appears well.
Good luck to Mourinho, it'll be great if we maintain or exceed recent seasons. But we all know no bumps in the road allowed.
Exactly, I love how it's already been revised as 'a bump in the road'...when in reality it was relegation form in the league for close to a year.Wasn't really a bump in the road though was it, it was more like a hole.
We might have just dispatched with our Ferguson. United famously nearly pulled the trigger on sacking him, but they didn't and the rest is history. We hit our first bump in the road with Poch and he got the flick. Two wins later, were in 5th and all appears well.
Good luck to Mourinho, it'll be great if we maintain or exceed recent seasons. But we all know no bumps in the road allowed.
Gareth Bale speaking to
@BTSport: "Spurs having José Mourinho there is an amazing statement from the club. He is a serial winner, Tottenham want to win trophies - I do not think there is a better partnership than Mourinho and Tottenham to try and win some trophies."
Yeah 25 points from 24 games is a "bump."We might have just dispatched with our Ferguson. United famously nearly pulled the trigger on sacking him, but they didn't and the rest is history. We hit our first bump in the road with Poch and he got the flick. Two wins later, were in 5th and all appears well.
Good luck to Mourinho, it'll be great if we maintain or exceed recent seasons. But we all know no bumps in the road allowed.
Come home Gareth
Exactly, I love how it's already been revised as 'a bump in the road'...when in reality it was relegation form in the league for close to a year.
Just go to show how much experience Mourinho has. His life is so colourful, good or bad. Is still so hard to come to terms he is with us, really. The chapter Poch has given us will always be fondly remembered. But the current era Mourinho is bringing us may really be the next exciting book Tottenham Hotspur could write in its history.A few excerpts of this. The part about him talking to the Chelsea players when he joined them could easily be repeated to our lads.
After Chelsea the first time the article doesn’t really have the same positive tone. So I’ll leave that bit out!
If you could do it all again, would you? Mourinho and his trail of trophies and destruction
https://theathletic.com/1429175/201...ubs-feel-about-him-now/?source=shared-article
BENFICA (September 2000 to December 2000)
At the age of 37, Mourinho was an unexpected choice for Benfica, promoted from within when Jupp Heynckes was sacked following a poor start to the 2000-01 season.
“When he arrived, the players were very disillusioned,” Fernando Meira, the former Portugal defender, tells The Athletic. “There were problems in the boardroom and financial issues. It was a very difficult time for Benfica. The team lacked identity. We wanted to be challenging for the title, but there wasn’t the quality in the squad.
“From the very first day, we could see that Mourinho was an ambitious coach. He was very direct. He was also very close to the players, really tuned in to their emotional side. We sensed we were in the presence of someone who could help us immensely. We saw that if we gave our best, he could take us to another level.”
Diogo Luis, a young left-back who made his debut under Mourinho, recalls, “He made a very good first impression. He put me at ease, telling me to relax and play the same way I had for the B team. The training sessions surprised me, because they were very dynamic and intense, with very few pauses. He had an incredible ability to motivate the players. He made us want to follow his every word. He won us over with the work he did on the pitch, the way he analysed our opponents, and with his communication skills. He was able to get the best from every player. He was up front with us. He wasn’t scared to tell people things to their face. That made us feel we were on the right path.”
But it was over almost before it began. Mourinho had only been in situ for five weeks when Joao Vale e Azevedo, who had appointed him, was replaced as president by Manuel Vilarinho, who was reported to have made plans to reappoint the former Benfica player and coach Toni. Mourinho, unsettled, began to agitate for a new contract. Vilarinho urged him to wait. After a 3-0 win over city rivals Sporting, Mourinho issued an ultimatum over the new contract. The president stood firm and the coach resigned, along with his assistant Carlos Mozer. “We understood that decision showed a lack of trust in our work,” Mourinho said.
Meira still sounds upset about it now. “I have no doubt he would have gone on to become one of the great Benfica coaches,” he says. “We could have had a team far stronger than we had at the time. But Mourinho is Mourinho. When it ended, it was a total breakdown. Everything died at Benfica after that.”
Vilarinho regrets it too, particularly given what Mourinho went on to achieve with the club’s arch-rivals FC Porto. “If it was today, Mourinho would never leave Benfica,” the former president said years later. “I would do exactly the opposite. I would extend his contract. Only later did I realise that one’s personality and pride cannot be put before the interest of the institution we serve.”
UNIAO DE LEIRIA (April 2001 to January 2002)
“To give you an idea,” says the former Portugal midfielder Silas, who is now in charge of Sporting, “Leiria are a club who currently play in the third division in Portugal. It’s a club whose expected place is mid-table or lower. Under Mourinho, we believed we could go to any stadium, play against any team, and win. We really believed we could beat any rival.”
Taking over in the final weeks of the 2000-01 season, Mourinho led Leiria to fifth place in the Primeira Liga. Suddenly, optimism swept Leiria. “He had a really close relationship with a number of players in particular,” Silas says. “You always assess a new coach. You want to know what kind of manager he is, whether or not he will be close to the players. With him, you could immediately see that he understood everything about the game. Everything. He was very strong on the emotional side of things. He knew how to control our emotions — when he had to prod us, when he had to show a bit more support. That was one of his strengths — and I believe it still is.”
By the halfway stage of 2001-02 campaign Leiria were threatening to sustain the most unexpected of title challenges. But questions about their staying power were soon overtaken by those about Mourinho’s future. At one point over the winter break he appeared set to return to Benfica. Instead, with Leiria fourth in the table, he left for Porto, where he had previously worked under Bobby Robson.
“He raised the level of Uniao de Leiria, and the players, but he did more than that,” Silas says. “I think everyone in Portugal would agree that the level of coaching in the country improved a great deal from the moment he emerged. People saw how he trained us and they looked at the methodology. There was one way of coaching before Mister Mourinho and another way after he appeared. It was more than just the club or any player.”
FC PORTO (January 2002 to June 2004)
If anyone at Porto has cause to talk about Mourinho in less than reverent terms, it is Vitor Baia, who clashed angrily with him on the training ground at the start of the 2002-03 season. The pair had worked together at Barcelona, so Baia’s team-mates were shocked to see Mourinho make an example of him, dropping him from the squad and recommending that the goalkeeper be suspended from all club activities.
A month later, Baia was reintegrated. He and his team-mates were left wondering whether, as well as stamping down on dissent, this was about the manager asserting his authority over the whole squad.
It certainly had the desired effect. Baia went on to be a key player in the team that, having been floundering below Leiria when Mourinho took over, won the UEFA Cup just 16 months later and then, of course, the Champions League a year after that. “Jose Mourinho wrote one of the most beautiful chapters in the history of FC Porto,” Baia says. He raised the level and the quality of our play. He raised it a great deal, in fact. Anything is possible when you bring together a good structure, strong leadership at board level and a young coach who wants to be the best in the world.
“And we were also a team full of quality, united by friendship. From the very first moment he made us believe that we could win it all. He had strong convictions, and voiced them in a language that was all his own. It was a simple message, but very assertive. As the competitions went on, we started to feel enormous confidence in ourselves. We thought we were the best, position by position, in the whole of Europe. He made us think everything was possible, even against teams with more money. All we needed to do was do our jobs with the right quality and put in the effort.”
It was that Champions League run in 2003-04 that elevated his profile beyond Europe. They beat Manchester United in the first knock-out round and, while there was a fortuitous offside call in the second leg, Baia recalls that tie as a triumph of mental strength. “The best moment was the draw,” the goalkeeper says. “When Manchester United’s name came out of the hat, he started to clap, jumping up from his seat to applaud. He said to us, ‘Finally we have an opponent who is at our level. Finally we’ll be able to be certain that we’re on the right path. And we’re going to knock them out.’
“That was the moment everyone clicked in the Champions League, with that approach. He transmitted a feeling of tranquillity to us.”
In two full seasons under Mourinho, Porto won the Primeira Liga twice, the Portuguese Cup once, the UEFA Cup and finished off with the Champions League, beating Monaco 3-0 in the final in Gelsenkirchen. In what seemed like a symbolic gesture, he took off his medal and walked off down the tunnel, as if to demonstrate that his mission at Porto was complete.
The manner of his departure upset Pinto da Costa, the club’s president, who called it “hasty, abrupt and bizarre”, but Baia will not hear a word said against his former coach. “Jose Mourinho is part of FC Porto’s history,” he says. “It’s undeniable. He’s one of the principal figures of the club’s history: for everything he won, for all his strength, for everything he represents. Honestly he’s a really special person. For me, he will always be one of the top three coaches in the world.”
(Photo: Christopher Lee/Getty Images)
CHELSEA (June 2004 to September 2007)
He had them at hello. Mourinho met John Terry, Wayne Bridge, Frank Lampard and Joe Cole at the England team hotel in Manchester before they went away to Euro 2004. He told them he liked them as players, all four of them, but then he asked them why they didn’t have a single winner’s medal to show for their careers to date. He reminded them what he had won and he told them that he was going to bring that winning mentality to Stamford Bridge. He was going to turn Chelsea’s nearly men into winners.
Eidur Gudjohnsen remembers something similar when the squad — minus those who were on holiday after Euro 2004 — gathered for the first day of pre-season training. “A few of us looked at each other that day and said, ‘We’re going to win the league this year’ — and that was just from one meeting,” the former Chelsea forward says. “The first training session convinced us even more. The tempo went up straight away.”
Cole recalls being struck by “the intensity of the training, but also the organisation. Everything had a purpose. English football had been left behind a bit tactically, but Jose challenged us tactically. He opened our eyes.”
Chelsea didn’t just win the Premier League that season — their first league championship in half a century — they won it by a 12-point margin, setting a new record of 95 points in a 38-game season. They won it again the following year and there was also a League Cup and an FA Cup over his three full seasons. While Roman Abramovich’s largesse had already transformed the club, it was Mourinho who transformed the team’s spirit on the pitch. Even Sir Alex Ferguson said his rival had raised the bar in terms of what was required of a title-challenging team in the Premier League.
Any nit-picking would focus on two issues: the playing style, which largely did not stir the soul of neutrals (or indeed Abramovich), and the failure to win the Champions League. Mourinho would offer no apologies for the first — to repeat, this was a club that hadn’t been champions of England in half a century — and the margins were paper-thin for the second. In the 2005 semi-final it was Luis Garcia’s famous “ghost goal” at Anfield. Two years later, on the same ground, it was a penalty shoot-out. Chelsea were the stronger team at the time and failed to do themselves justice in those two semi-final ties, but these defeats hardly amounted to sackable offences.
The problem was that, towards the end of that third season, relations between Mourinho and some of his senior players — and indeed the club’s hierarchy — became strained. A month into the fourth season, he was sacked, with just 24,973 fans watching his final game in charge, a bleak 1-1 draw at home to Rosenborg in the Champions League.
No regrets, though. “Absolutely not,” says Tim Rolls, who writes for the Chelsea fanzine CFCUK. “Jose came in with a confidence and a swagger that changed the whole club. He brought in this confidence that we were going to win trophies. I don’t think that was really there previously under Claudio Ranieri. But Jose came in and changed the whole spirit around the club. Those first two seasons were fantastic. He was exactly what the club needed at that moment in time.”