James Lawton: Mourinho's arrogance undermines optimism

You could see that Jose Mourinho was pretty high on himself in Gelsenkirchen last week when his Porto eventually ransacked a Monaco team coached by a Didier Deschamps, who in winning European Cups with Marseille and Juventus and a World Cup with France knew the kind of satisfaction which the great Portuguese technocrat, an apparently abysmal player, can still only dream about.

You could see that Jose Mourinho was pretty high on himself in Gelsenkirchen last week when his Porto eventually ransacked a Monaco team coached by a Didier Deschamps, who in winning European Cups with Marseille and Juventus and a World Cup with France knew the kind of satisfaction which the great Portuguese technocrat, an apparently abysmal player, can still only dream about.

Deschamps was once put down by Eric Cantona as a mere "water carrier", but then maybe the imperious Eric, like Mourinho, had a couple of chips on the shoulders which shrugged so imperiously.

While Cantona was undoubtedly a brilliant talisman for Manchester United in domestic football, no one ever saw him him do much of anything in international competition and, while France more or less disowned him as a serious footballer, it was left to an English critic to deliver the coup de grâce. "Cantona," he wrote, "has a genius for rising to the small occasion." Unfortunately as a player, and this probably explains much of what is least attractive about this obviously brilliant man, even that was beyond Jose Mario Santos Mourinho Felix.

The son of a coach, Mourinho couldn't really play. Plainly it has gnawed at him down the years. Also, no doubt, it has been tremendous motivation. He is, plainly, a hell of a coach. Whether or not he is a wise man is another matter and certainly the evidence at Stamford Bridge the other day threw up several serious question marks.

In the flush of his excellent triumph in Germany, the climax of a superb two-year campaign which, as he rightly said, added the greatest club trophy in the world to the Uefa Cup he took at the expense of Martin O'Neill's Celtic, Mourinho revealed his fear that in 10 years he might look back at the Arena AufSchalke as an isolated peak in his career. His behaviour when paraded by Roman Abramovich and his chief executive, Peter Kenyon, who seemed so pleased with his negotiating triumph he might just have forgotten his £5m-a-year bargaining tool, did not notably reduce the risk of precisely that fate.

What Mourinho's dogmatic - "I didn't come out of the bottle, I'm special" - style achieved with Porto's relatively low-rent players was utterly remarkable. However, it might not work quite so effectively with the cream of European football Abramovich's roubles have put at his disposal. While his Porto players have been falling over each other to join the Mourinho bandwagon rolling along the King's Road, Fernando Morientes, for one, might be less overwhelmed, and that would be even more the case if he hadn't suffered two highly debatable offside decisions while bearing down on the Porto goal last week.

How, let us guess, would somebody like Zinedine Zidane or Thierry Henry or Paolo Maldini - or for that matter, the great Chelsea favourite Gianfranco Zola - react to a failed Second Division player who said, for example: "We must try to understand the culture of many other areas that can help a manager do better...I'm concerned about those things. I have to be involved with the medical team, statistics, audio-visual. This is modern football."

Maldini, also the son of a coach but one who flowered in the hothouse of San Siro, might say that there is no modern or ancient football, just the fundamental chemistry of players who want to play for a certain coach out of a combination of reasons; love, respect, sometimes outright terror, but always respect. Money never has and never will enter this particular equation.

Mourinho's belief that he has pushed back the science of football is scarcely new, though it has probably never been announced with quite such a glow of self-congratulation. Probably the best parrallel belongs in the 1960s with the rise of Helenio Herrera, a brilliant technical coach - also a passable player in the French First Division - who conducted his duties at Barcelona and then Internazionale with even more swagger than Senhor Mourinho.

Not strikingly modest, Herrera, who was known as Il Majo - the magician - eventually wrote a book. He entitled it simply Yo [meaning "I"]. Apart from developing the catenaccio - bolted door - system of defence, Herrera imposed a series of rituals on his players. One of them required each player to touch the ball before kick-off. Most of his players, including the great Luis Suárez complied. But another superb performer, Ladislav Kubala, who in his time represented Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Spain, considered it the biggest load of cojones he had ever heard. There was a row and disaffection spread through the Barça team.

Herrera was revered in San Siro when he took over Inter. He wore his coat over his shoulders and walked imperiously down the touchline. He arrived in Lisbon for the European Cup final in 1967 against Jock Stein's Celtic like some king of the universe - a bit like Mourinho at Stamford Bridge when you think about it. The trouble was the Celtic players, all of whom of course came from a 20-mile radius of Glasgow, would have run through several brick walls for the tough but unassuming Big Jock. They duly smashed through Herrera's fabled bolted door.

Later, Bill Shankly, who revered Stein, attended an official reception, at which the broken Herrera was harangued by several members of the Celtic coaching staff. One shocked witness turned to Shankly and asked, "Who on earth told them to do that?" Shankly said, "I did."

Another cautionary tale for Mourinho: when Brian Clough arrived at Leeds United in 1974 as the hottest young manager in English football, he promptly told his new players, who had just won the championship by a distance, and set an unbeaten record from the start of the season only just bettered by Arsenal, that they should throw all their medals in the nearest dustbin. He lasted 44 days before going on to win two European Cups for Nottingham Forest. What Clough learned so valuably at Elland Road was that the greatest coach in the world is nothing without the hearts and minds of his players.

Mourinho was a marvel at Porto but there were times when he seemed a bit of a moron at Stamford Bridge. He didn't seem to realise that every club - and every challenge - is different. The image he projected was particularly unfortunate because, after their scabrous treatment of the humane Claudio Ranieri, Chelsea were in need of every bit of goodwill they could muster this week. Instead of that, Mourinho preened, Kenyon chortled his glee - and perhaps some relief - and Abramovich played the part of the reformed despot.

How long will that last? No one can be sure but there is certainly some reason to believe that Mourinho is kidding himself if he thinks the oligarch's demeanour while trying to tempt a hugely successful coach is something consistently produced over the next few months if results are not all that he desires.

One of the new coach's most ill-advised lunges was to ask of Ranieri what he had ever won at Stamford Bridge. The obvious answer: more than a few hearts. On and off the field, Mourinho may just need a few of those quicker than he could ever imagine.