Chelsea’s José Mourinho has nothing left to prove except his staying power

http://www.theguardian.com/football/2015/apr/25/chelsea-jose-mourinho-staying-power

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On the strip of the Côte d’Azur where Roman Abramovich spends parts of his year, where the yachts are super-sized, the neighbours include Bill Gates and Baron Saatchi and, to quote one of the local estate agents, calling it upmarket is a bit like saying New York has some “fairly high buildings”, they tell a story about Chelsea’s owner that goes to show even the wealthiest of men sometimes cannot get things just as they want them.

It goes back to his arrival on the pine-covered promontory known as the Peninsula of Billionaires. Abramovich had added one of its mansions to his extensive property portfolio but apparently wasn’t entirely happy with the pebbled beach and one day two large boats pitched up to dump a cargo of white sand over the stones. For a few days, Abramovich had the look he wanted. But only a few days. When a gale whipped off the sea it turned out his very own Grand Designs had one flaw. His new creation was blown away and, if we can be excused a brief moment of schadenfreude, there is something vaguely amusing about one of the world’s richest oligarchs with a beach-towel in his hand and the expression on his face wondering where all his sand had gone.

Related: Arsène Wenger wants to show José Mourinho the way to go next season | Paul Wilson

Back in London, the aesthetics might not always have been just as the Russian would have wanted either. Abramovich, in an ideal world, would like football of butterfly beauty at Chelsea. He is after a version of Barcelona-blue and the fact it has never quite worked out that way has become a popular choice of artillery for the regiment of critics who find it difficult to accept why, in Luís Lourenço’s biography of José Mourinho, there is a foreword by Manuel Sérgio, his professor on a sports science degree at the Technical University of Lisbon in 1984, describing Chelsea’s manager as “a coach of the stature that Maradona and Pelé were as players”.

Think of Maradona and Pelé and the things that instinctively come to mind are the joys of the sport. Mourinho is harder to embrace, with his need for conflict, the putdowns, the hypocrisies, the long line of exaggerated grievances, repeated so often that you eventually start to think he actually believes them, and that unending habit of making enemies of people who never wanted to fight in the first place. He operates by his own rules, with his own code of behaviour and ethos, and that is a killer line in the book Manchester City’s chief executive, Ferran Soriano, wrote in his years at Barça. Mourinho, Soriano explained, could not be employed at the Camp Nou when he always made everything so personal. “His method generates media conflict almost permanently and it is also a potential source of conflict within the club.”

But just count the trophies. By Wednesday, Mourinho may have added another Premier League title to his collection, with almost a month to spare. Even if the coronation is delayed, we are talking about a man who will then have won eight league championships in four different countries, the European Cup with two clubs, the Uefa Cup, the FA Cup, three League Cups, the Spanish Cup, the Italian Cup and numerous other tournaments around the edges. Mourinho once went nine years without losing a home game and has more than 20 recognised manager-of-the-year awards to his name. Yes, he can be incredibly tiresome sometimes but when the trophy machine is this prolific the question uppermost in Abramovich’s thoughts should not be of the team’s occasional lack of adventure but how to ensure the Mourinho era lasts considerably longer than last time.

Mourinho has hardly anything left to prove when it comes to defeating everybody else. What he has not done is sustain that success at one club for longer than two or three seasons. A better offer came along when he was at Porto and Internazionale. Or people fall out, grudges fester and then we reach that stage where the smudges under his eyes suddenly seem more pronounced and everything unravels. It happened at Chelsea in his first stint, it divided Real Madrid into a state of civil war, and it was one of the principal reasons why Manchester United had reservations about him replacing Sir Alex Ferguson. Put bluntly, they wanted a long-term relationship rather than a brief fling.

So far there has been absolutely no sign of Mourinho continuing that pattern at Chelsea and, if they want to stroke that formidable ego some more, it would surely make perfect sense for the relevant people at Stamford Bridge to use the coming summer as a suitable time to extend the manager’s contract, which runs until 2017, by as long as they feel appropriate.

It was their third season together last time when Mourinho and Abramovich started to rub against each other like sandpaper and Ferguson, another mischief-maker extraordinaire, began one press conference by asking whether even the sparrows coughed at Stamford Bridge. Louis van Gaal now seems ready to reinvigorate a meaningful rivalry between the team from Old Trafford and the one on Fulham Road. Manchester City will surely be better next season. Yet the bad news for Chelsea’s rivals is that Mourinho is still only 52. Ferguson reached the same age in the year he won the first of his 13 Premier Leagues. Bob Paisley was 57 when he held aloft the league championship trophy for the first time as Liverpool’s manager. Just imagine the glories that could lie in wait for Chelsea if Mourinho remains in position for, say, eight-to-10 years.

Related: Eden Hazard will cost £100m each leg, José Mourinho warns Real Madrid

The number of controversies in that time would be immeasurable, undoubtedly, but it would be a shame if Chelsea’s dominance this season is downplayed because of his love of a lockdown and uncommon ability to convince himself that everyone else – the referees, the newspapers, the Football Association and, increasingly, anyone holding a Sky Sports microphone – must be out to get him. His team have looked down on the rest since the last week of August and there is a danger sometimes to overplay their recent habit of winning matches in a rigid, get-the-job-done, tactical straightjacket. The truth is Chelsea win matches in all different types of ways. Some people may not want to admit it but there are far more occasions when they simply outplay their opponents.

Arsène Wenger got a laugh with that throwaway line – a dismissive “One‑nil? Usual”– after he heard Chelsea’s score last weekend but it was a cheap shot really. There is only City who have scored more goals than Chelsea this season and that might be because they have played two more games. Chelsea, contrary to the popular belief, did not actually have a 1-0 league win until 11 February. Since then, there have been three more but if Wenger tots up the figures he might be surprised. Chelsea have had eight in the two seasons Mourinho has been back at the club, whereas Arsenal have had seven, and it is the team in blue who are the more prolific scorers, 136 to 131. Six of them, lest it be forgotten, came when Arsenal went into enemy territory last season in Wenger’s 1,000th match with the club, a landmark the Frenchman must remember with all the fondness of an ingrowing toenail.

No, as he would probably tell you himself, Mourinho’s greatness is indisputable. His problem, perhaps, is that people will always be turned off when a man drinks from pots of venom and squirts out the mixture at anyone he sees fit. That is the shame for those of us who want to see the good not the bad and tire of the lines being blurred.

Yet Chelsea always knew that would be the case when they went back to him and the bottom line here is that, in football, there is the nearest thing to a guarantee of sustained success if he does make this a long-term relationship, winding everyone up, nakedly adversarial, telling us that if there is a problem it is us not him.

Moss is odd choice for final but may have last laugh on Halsey

The mind goes back to Louis van Gaal’s first game at Old Trafford, when Manchester United took on Valencia in a pre-season friendly last August. After 32 minutes, Wayne Rooney jumped for a high ball. He missed it and the referee, Jon Moss, awarded a penalty that was so absurd one wondered what kind of chaos would have ensued had it been a more important occasion.

Since then, it has been difficult not to note the frequency with which Moss’s name has cropped up during a season when Match of the Day has become a late-night ritual for every student of refereeing demonology. Moss has never been entrusted to cover one of the Premier League’s more challenging assignments – a Manchester derby, for example – and I would imagine there are a lot of people in the game who are surprised he has been awarded the FA Cup final.

All the same, there has been some lousy stuff said about him over the last week from people who should appreciate the pressures of the business and know how difficult it is without making it even worse.

“Seriously, Jon Moss at Wembley?” Mark Halsey, the former referee, wanted to know among a steady stream of interviews, blogs and withering follow-up comments. “I can’t be having that. I reckon we’ll be a laughing stock around the world.”

Halsey and Keith Hackett, heckling from on high like the refereeing equivalent of Statler and Waldorf, have gone into bat on behalf of Mark Clattenburg, arguing that the authorities are actively working against their favoured choice because his face doesn’t fit.

Hackett now says Clattenburg should quit England for Major League Soccer and blames David Elleray and his “acolytes” on the FA referees’ committee. “I guess that while Elleray is in charge, Clattenburg, like Mark Halsey before him, will never be appointed to referee the FA Cup final.”

They are entitled to be perplexed but it also strikes me there is some old score-settling going on here and that Halsey in particular might have been slightly more considerate to the man he has repeatedly undermined. The pressure on Moss has multiplied and it would be intriguing to know what he makes of Halsey describing himself as someone who tries “to help referees and offer constructive criticism”.

Final perks mean a killing for touts

Once again, thousands of football fans will not be able to see their team play in the FA Cup final and the cluster of craggy old men touting for business on the steps outside Wembley Park tube station will be making a financial killing.

Arsenal and Aston Villa will each receive 25,000 tickets. Both would like considerably more (Arsenal, to put it into context, have 45,000 season-ticket holders) but the FA, happy to ditch just about every other tradition when it comes to this competition, still keep back 23,000 for the “football family”.

It’s not a bad thing that the FA want to reward some of the volunteers who work at grassroots level. Yet maybe it would be fairer on the supporters of the finalists if those perks were set aside for England matches.