Mourinho trumped by his own tricks

When Jose Mourinho came to this country eight months ago the first lesson that he taught his new public was that they had better get used to a manager who considered winning football matches his priority and would relegate the rest of life to the waiting room. The new Chelsea coach was fixated on winning trophies by the methods that had served him so admirably over two phenomenal seasons in Porto and he was not planning on changing that formula any time soon.

Mourinho, you sensed, decided he could make friends among his Premiership peers some other day. Entertaining, free-flowing football would wait. Upholding some ancient concept about the spirit of association football? Jose would get back to you on that one. What mattered above all to Mourinho was maintaining his pristine reputation for winning and he was not about to sacrifice that to appease an old English notion of general fair play and cautious modesty in the face of success and failure.

And all but the most marble-hearted of us admired him for it. The way he talked about winning, about his own strengths and the lengths he would go to succeed, was different to anything we had heard before: unfettered and without embarrassment. Then on the occasion of his team's defeat to Barcelona on Wednesday night, the man who likes to call himself the Special One suddenly went all coy on us. And his club began to complain about the terms of the very rules their manager had just drawn up.

When Frank Rijkaard opened the door to the Nou Camp's referee's room on Wednesday to have a chat with Anders Frisk, he was embracing the Mourinho creed. It is a creed that invites every manager to push the interests of his own side up to the limits of what we consider acceptable. It is the creed that shrugs when coaches take liberties with the truth on players' injuries - Damien Duff springs to mind - and the creed that occasionally whispers in the referee's ear at half-time.

It is also a creed that allowed Mourinho to justify his fairly astonishing intervention in the first leg of Porto's Uefa Cup semi-final victory in 2003 when he grabbed Lazio's Lucas Castroman to prevent him from taking a potentially dangerous quick throw-in. Mourinho describes the incident in his autobiography and what delighted him most was the Lazio player's reaction to his subsequent apology: "He [Castroman] smiled," Mourinho wrote, "and simply said 'Mister, it's football'."

To Mourinho, that is all the evidence required to prove that football is, on occasions, a scoundrel's game. A game in which pragmatism and cunning rule and the fool is the manager who believes that he will be judged upon the friends he has made and the rules he has left unbroken rather than the trophies he has won and the teams he has beaten. Up until Wednesday night, Mourinho had convinced us that this unforgiving, high-stakes world was one that he inhabited without complaint.

But it only took a bit of sharp practice from Rijkaard, the kind of informal conversation between officials and managers that takes place every Saturday afternoon of the football season, to rattle the Chelsea coach. The Dutchman does not look like your average dug-out schemer, in fact his dreadlocks, heavy eyelids and habit of directing answers at the ceiling above his audience's heads gives him the aspect of a man who is thinking of his next cigarette rather than his team's formation.

On Wednesday, however, Rijkaard outmanoeuvred Mourinho like no other coach has managed this season. With 11 men until the 55th minute, Chelsea were unspectacular but they were solid and one goal in front with a defence that had prevented Ronaldinho and Samuel Eto'o from creating chances. If it was Didier Drogba who Rijkaard discussed with Frisk then the Barcelona coach chose his target well because the striker looked like Chelsea's most volatile player.

His challenge on Victor Valdes did not look enough to earn him a second booking, but it was enough to remind Frisk where he was and, perhaps, what had been said to him at half-time. Reduced to 10 men, Mourinho's strategy of containment could not take the strain and Barcelona shirts streamed in behind a defence that had appeared to be sealed tight for an hour. On the touchline, Mourinho was helpless - which must have hurt more than anything.

Not speaking to the Press after the match was a petulant, unnecessary act from a man who has plenty to say when it suits him. It also deprived Mourinho of a weapon that he has wielded most effectively for much of his career. Chelsea's brief statement that they were complaining to Uefa, the governing body of European football, drew disbelieving looks from those who have covered the tumultuous history of this famous Catalan club. The Nou Camp, more than anywhere in Europe, should have been a reminder to Chelsea that they might be ludicrously rich but they do not yet have the prestige to dictate terms at football clubs with far more glorious pasts than theirs.

In the same room a day earlier, Mourinho had disclosed his own line-up in a speech of insouciance, bravado and wit. By the usual standards of staid Champions' League pre-match build-ups it might have been outrageous but it also spoke of a brash new confidence in English football that, for those who saw it, was more than a little beguiling. That, too, was lost on Wednesday: first in the Duff misinformation and then in the silence that followed the game.

What we are left with is the sense that Mourinho, and Chelsea, still have a lot to prove and that starts with the Carling Cup final against Liverpool on Sunday. Mourinho must learn, it seems, that English football will accept a tough-talking young gun but only if he plays by the rules he has himself established. And that included not complaining to the referee about his former protégé Deco diving when every one in the Nou Camp knew that, when it comes to the black art of gamesmanship, Jose Mario Santos Mourinho Felix's name is on the manuscript.