Little surprise too given his continuing inferiority to Pep Guardiola and Barcelona. In the Catalans, Mourinho has come up against one of the world’s best teams of all time and he simply isn’t good enough to beat them. This isn’t a reason to be ashamed or criticised. To beat this Barcelona team would be a remarkable feat. For Mourinho to have not beaten them is no shock. He is not the ‘special’ one, but the pretender to the real special one, Guardiola. He is obviously one of the world’s best coaches, but he does not have the expansive style to be able to beat a team like Barcelona consistently.
Mourinho has apparently been at loggerheads with members of his squad, too. As reported in Marca this week, the following conversation took place between Mourinho and defender Sergio Ramos.
Mourinho: “You killed me in the mixed zone.”
Ramos: “No, mister, you only read what it says in the papers not everything we said.”
Mourinho: “Sure, because you Spaniards have been world champions and your friends in the media protect you … and because the goalkeeper …”
At that point there is a shout from Casillas: “Eh, mister, round here you say things to our faces, eh!”
Mourinho: “Where were you on the first goal [against Barcelona], Sergio?”
Ramos: “Marking Piqué”
Mourinho: “Well, you should have been marking Puyol.”
Ramos: “Yes, but they were blocking us off [using basketball style screens] with Piqué and we decided to change the marking.”
Mourinho: “What? So now you’re playing at being coach?”
“No,” replies Ramos, “but depending on the situation in the game, sometimes you have to change the marking. Because you’ve never been a player, you don’t know that that sometimes happens.”
The conversation is startling and the silence from Madrid and Mourinho has spoken volumes. It implies civil war between the Spanish contingent and the Portuguese at the Bernabeu. That Ramos does not defer to Mourinho the way the likes of John Terry and Frank Lampard did at Chelsea must agitate his ego.
But it says something else too. At Chelsea, it was Mourinho who made them the team they were, who made Terry, Lampard and Didier Drogba into the top class talents they were. They were made by him, they owed him a lot. As did his players at Inter Milan, whom he took to Champions League glory. The same isn’t true in Spain. Casillas, Ramos and Xabi Alonso have all won the World Cup and European Championships. These players know the way to play is the Barcelona way. As Ramos indicated after the defeat to Barcelona in the first leg of the King’s Cup, they can only do so much with a defensive style. Mourinho has a new challenge here; convincing players who have already reached the top, playing expansive football, that his defensive style is better.
It won’t work. And that, in short, is probably why Mourinho will leave Madrid this summer, whether they win the league or not. Mourinho compared himself to Zinedine Zidane after being booed at the weekend against Athletic Bilbao, saying even the Frenchman was booed. True, but Zidane also won Real the European Cup with a piece of magic. Mourinho has yet to come close. He may not get the chance, either.
