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Mourinho unraveling along with his team

Jose Mourinho. (Image via Tsutomu Takasu, Wikimedia Commons)
Expert
4th October, 2015
20

Of course, for Chelsea, the red alert has been sounding for a while now, if only in response to a number of startling micro-crises; the form, or utter lack thereof, of Branislav Ivanovic, the dropping of John Terry, and the continued antics, and subsequent fallout, of Diego Costa.

There are more, too.

But now, as Chelsea succumbed in a fashion so unlike them, at least in recent memory, 3-1 to Southampton at home, Jose Mourinho himself appears to have knitted all these spot-calamities into one huge, all-encompassing, club-wide catastrophe.

He did so in his post-match interview, which was essentially a seven-minute rant, verging deep into the existential.

Mourinho was asked by the interviewer: “What did you make of your team’s performance?” His response was prefaced with a pair of ominous phrases “I think you know me… first of all I want to say…”.

He seemed to be winding up for his biggest ever unjustified balk, a whinge the scope of which has never been seen, not even in a Mourinho press conference. He called for honesty, for frank assessment, apparently throwing off the blinders to fix a clear gaze on the gleaming serrated reality of things.

Then he complained that the referees weren’t giving his team enough penalties. Trembling as we were for something new, something astonishing, suddenly our bodies went limp with the mundane familiarity of it all.

But then his monologue went on, like entranced whirling dervish nudged off balance. One and half minutes in, Mourinho mentions Diego Costa’s ban, then a breath later, their midweek loss in the Champions League. Something is building, a bubbling surge of technicolour bile, fantastic and caustic.

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Only partially satiated as we were with the entree list of unawarded penalties, Mourinho served up a filling main course by turning a scathing eye to his players.

“My team, in this moment, the first negative thing that happens, the team collapses. The team, mentally, psychologically, is unbelievably down. It looks like good players are bad players.”

His assessment of the match, garnished again with talk of denied penalties, was somehow, at the same time, one-sided and brutally honest.

Then, without another question being asked, Mourinho, in a moment steeped in Freudian revelation, says this:

“I can also know what you are thinking and saying in the studio. What people are saying is going to happen is not going to happen. I want to make it clear – one I do not run away. Two – if the club wants to sack me they have to sack me because I am not running away from my responsibilities from my team or from my conviction.

Yes, there it was, like a freshly hatched reptile, the greasy sight of Mourinho hypothesising about some future sacking, completely and utterly unprompted. Why Mourinho would make some mystical attempt to preempt talk of redundancy, at first, makes no sense. But if we pause the playback for a few moments, the stark horror of Chelsea’s title defence comes into focus; they stand fifth-bottom, with the second-worst defensive record in the league.

They are in the middle of their worst start to a Premier League season, their worst league start since 1978, the season they finished bottom. They have already conceded more goals than they did over the entirety of Mourinho’s first season at Chelsea.

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Their eight points from eight matches is leading them, historically speaking, to an expected final finish of 14th, the average league finish for teams that collect this many points from this many matches. No team has finished higher than fifth after this sort of start.

With this latest loss, Mourinho saw for the very first time a visiting team score more than two goals at Stamford Bridge. At one point, Southampton had registered nine second-half shots to Chelsea’s zero. There might be a warrant out for Dusan Tadic’s arrest, after he murdered poor Ivanovic (or did he just desecrate an already lifeless body?).

It’s enough to separate anyone from their sanity, and Mourinho seems a little removed from real life at the best of times. And it wasn’t over either.

“This is a crucial time in the history of this club,” Mourinho said.

“Do you know why? Because if the club sacks me, they sack the best manager that this club has had…”

Prior to driving this iron wedge between himself and his employers, almost goading them into firing him, Mourinho had spoken, visibly and painfully unsure of what he was about to say, that he was “more than convinced that we will finish in the top four and when the season is so bad and you finish in the top four it’s okay”.

The sentence was barely audible over echoes of Arsene Wenger’s laughter, and catcalls of “there’s no such thing as a fourth-place trophy”.

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“Living the worst period of my career, the worst results of my career, doing that as a professional hurts me a lot, doing that at Chelsea hurts me twice.”

Mourinho said these words with eyes squinted slightly, wincing as the sentence spilled from a mouth now resembling a jagged tear. He finished his diatribe by bringing us, now giddy, full circle, back to the referees. He bade thanks, and bolted.

One question asked, and a seven-minute answer given. Like a timpani rolling down a hill, there was no stopping this mad noise. Jose will not want to watch this footage back, video evidence of his own crazed unraveling.

The Special One is now in a very special place of his own making, a lonely place, and the only consolation that exists for him there is his own babbling.

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