Smooth operator

To paraphrase Archie Gemmill on Graeme Souness: if José Mourinho was made of chocolate, he’d eat himself. A cheating, negative, diving, conniving shower of dislikeable tossers his team may largely be, but the Porto boss has been the undisputed star of this season’s Champions League.

Mourinho is, to all intents and purposes, the world’s first metrosexual football manager. Dapper, suave and expensively-coiffed, he resembles a walking caricature of a swarthy Latin lover, always looking as though he has just stepped out of a car advert on TV, in which he takes the new model of the Seat Ibiza for a spin through some European forest at dusk.
Whenever his arrogantly handsome features appear on the screen, you can almost hear a guttural Portuguese accent muttering: “Your wives, they want to fuck me…”
And then there’s that splendidly elegant dark overcoat that he always wears while sitting in the dug-out. In fact, I have a suspicion that Mourinho gets rid of his coat after each game, and replaces it with a new one to be worn during the next fixture – all charged to FC Porto’s expense account gold card, of course, at no little cost.
Nonetheless, his smouldering presence on the touchline has been far more watchable than the unpalatable mixture of deeply tedious massed defence and unappealing gamesmanship that his players have been serving up for the vast majority of their unlikely run to the Champions League final.
Apart from a 25-minute spell of attacking brilliance in the home leg against United, they have looked a rather negative lot, getting loads of bodies behind the ball, soaking up pressure, and giving it to their one undoubted world class player, Deco, who then typically heads for the corner flag to waste some more time. They have a well-organised defence, true, but so do any other amount of teams, and most of them don’t have a keeper as poor as Vitor Baia.
Yet, somehow, Porto are in the European Cup final. And however they get on against Monaco this coming Wednesday in Gelsenkirchen, it is looking as though we will be seeing a lot more of Mourinho and his nice overcoat in the near future. Roman Abramovich is apparently prepared to offer him a sick amount of money to leave northern Portugal and come to Chelsea, where he will have a nine-figure transfer budget to blow on the likes of David Beckham.
However, other reports suggest that Mourinho’s preference is for the Liverpool job – probably not because he wants to go down as the man who finally got the best out of Harry Kewell and El Hadji Diouf, but because he doesn’t fancy enduring an entire season of Roman Abramovich ordering him who to buy and sell.
This is what has just happened to Claudio Ranieri. Mourinho is a far sharper and savvier beast than Ranieri. If he finishes second or lower, and doesn’t again reach the last four of the Champions League, he will have disimproved on Ranieri’s season. Now, however much money Abramovich spends in the summer, the new manager will still have to contend with Arsenal’s current ascendancy. And that’s to say nothing of a possible Man United recovery, though they will probably thrash around in their current paroxysms of ineptitude for a while longer yet.
As for the Champions League, it will be a long time before that tournament again sees a last four as weak as this year’s. Chelsea will never again have a better chance to win it than the one they spurned a couple of weeks ago. Their chances of reaching the last four twice in succession, whoever they purchase between now and August, are slim. As Ranieri found out, buying an entire team of new players and trying to get them to knit quickly is like sticking a three-pin plug into a two-pin socket.
Not that Mourinho would be stupid enough to introduce an apparently sedated Juan Sebastian Veron at half-time of a European Cup semi-final, or repeatedly pick Jesper Gronkjaer when Damien Duff in a sling would have been a better bet.
Whichever Premiership club he comes to, he achieved, he can at least be relied upon to fuck with Arsene Wenger’s head. Which means that, in the near certain absence of a Man United revival next season, Mourinho will probably be my primary source of entertainment during 2004/05.