“MY FAVOURITE PLACE on Earth is my little town with a beach where I have a house,” Jose Mourinho told The Big Issue in an interview last year. “To feel at home, smell home and at the same time it’s a place where I can walk on the beach in the morning and no one disturbs me.”
Mourinho probably won’t get a chance to feel the sand on his toes on his return to Portugal this week. If he was disturbed on his seaside stroll, would the local concerned agree with the popular view that the Chelsea manager’s dark energy is now corroding him to the point where he will soon be just a gloopy puddle of bile in an ill-fitting tracksuit? Probably not, actually.
Even in the early days at Porto Mourinho carried with him the whiff of sulphur. He had the reptilian eyes, narrowed with cunning, the menacing sneer and the Machiavellian game-plan. But he was still sort of….fun, glamorous, dangerous. More James Dean than Lord Voldemort.
It’s widely posited that his experience at Real Madrid tipped him over the edge. In the words of Nietzsche: “Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster… for when you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you” (clearly referring to Sergio Ramos and Iker Casillas there, was Nietzsche).
Last season’s absurd paranoia was followed in the opening weeks of this campaign by the sad and depressing Eva Carneiro saga and the tiresome defence of Diego Costa, making Mourinho’s disappearance into the darkness seem complete.
So what do they make of him back home? Is his behaviour a national embarrassment or does he remain the underdog from Setubal sticking it to the big men of European football?
“Mourinho is universally admired and respected in Portugal. He’s certainly seen as a source of pride,” says Tom Kundert of the Portugoal.net website.
“Of course, when he gets up to his underhand tricks it is commented on and he does draw a modicum of criticism, but usually very tame. The more usual reaction when Mourinho is under fire for something he did or said is a slow shake of the head and something akin to: “they can’t handle his success”; “it’s terrible what jealousy does to people” or simply to laugh it off.”
So they’re sticking by their man. But how Portuguese is Mourinho anyway? Unlike Alex Ferguson, insolubly Scottish, or, say, Giovanni Trapattoni, quintessentially Italian to his very shoe leather, Mourinho, by dint of his nomadic career, seems international rather than local — not that he is admired any less back home for that.
“Portugal is far from being junk,” he said in an interview with national television station RTP in 2011, after ratings agency Moody’s had downgraded his home country’s economic outlook. “The situation will improve.”
And the situation has improved. Like Ireland, Portugal emerged from its bailout program and is posting modest growth. But you can still see how, for a country among the worst affected by the most recent global recession, a figure like Mourinho serves as a buttress to national self-confidence. “I long for a society which recognises merit,” he told RTP, “where the opportunities don’t just go to the elite and politicians are elected for competence not by the party machines.”
“You can argue his character traits — at least the public persona — of being arrogant, sly and an attention-seeker, but a winner, only increase his popularity,” says Kundert, “because they are the opposite of the usual characteristics of Portuguese people in all walks of life, especially the millions of emigrants, who tend to be humble, straight-forward and not particularly ambitious.”
You could say Mourinho harks back to the glories of Portugal’s past, not the fragile present in post-bailout recovery. In the recently published book ‘Conquerors: How Portugal Seized the Indian Ocean and Forged the First Global Empire’, author Roger Crowley tells the story of Vasco Da Gama’s voyage to discover a sea route to Asia and slam the good news of Christianity into the faces of whomsoever they met along the way.
One account of sectarian savagery details how Da Gama ordered the massacre of a group of Muslim and Hindu fishermen off the coast of modern India. He hung their bodies from his masts then later sent a boat to shore with a letter. “I have come to this port to buy and sell and pay for your produce,” the message read, “and here is the produce of your country.” The boat carried the bodies of the slaughtered fishermen.
And you thought Mourinho was bad.
That voyage helped establish Portugal as the first global imperial power, built on the back of its naval power and the boldness of its merchants. In some ways, Portugal’s position in modern football is reminiscent of that time: an influential player in the trade of players from South America to Europe and disproportionately successful in terms of its clubs and coaches given its size.
“I speak with the water, the sand and the seagulls,” said Mourinho about his hideaway back home. “It’s my favourite place, really.”
When his overseas conquests are complete Mourinho intends to finish his career as coach of the Portuguese national team. The more leisurely pace of international management should allow him to spend some more time at his beach retreat.
Those poor seagulls.
Originally published at 12.15am
