Twelve years ago this week Jose Mourinho crossed the Rubicon into the realms of the unforgivable. At a Chelsea press conference following an entertaining 4-2 victory over Blackburn the self-proclaimed Special One was asked to respond to comments made by his arch-nemesis Arsene Wenger prior to the game.
Emboldened by a win that had ended a tough week of results and with a propensity to be at his cruellest when gloating, Mourinho duly sharpened his tongue.
“I think he is one of these people who is a voyeur. He likes to watch other people.
“There are some guys who, when they are at home, have a big telescope to see what happens in other families.
Wenger must be one of them – it is a sickness.”
Even as early as 2005 with Mourinho only a year into his tenure in west London he had already accumulated quite a rap-sheet for controversy while the feud between he and the Gunners boss was bubbling along nicely having initially simmered into life from the alleged tapping up of Ashley Cole. This though was something else entirely. The media lapped it up and the mockery was widespread.
Eight years later – and now deep into his second stint at Chelsea – the headline-magnet was asked if he regretted his remarks that day
“I don’t regret,” he said. “These are football fall-outs, not personal fall-outs. Football fall-outs you have today and forget about tomorrow.”
Except it was anything but a professional jibe. A professional jibe was taunting Carlo Ancelotti for losing a Champions League final while 3-0 up at half-time. It was insisting that Rafa Benitez should thank him for the Spaniard’s title win at Inter. Those were ‘football fall-outs’ from a man whose list of enemies reads like a managerial who’s who.
Whereas his comments regarding Wenger on October 31st 2005 was designed to go much deeper than that. Their intention was to strip away earned status; to belittle and humiliate a colleague by conjuring up the image in everybody’s minds of a highly respected figure behaving like a Peeping Tom.
Football had little to do with it: this was less manager-to-manager than mano-a-mano and the purpose was to inflict considerable personal hurt. Sometime later Daily Mail journalist Patrick Collins referred back to it as a ‘wicked smear’. It was even more than that. It was sick, or indeed a sickness.
What makes his remarkably discourteous retort all the more ungracious is that Wenger – on this occasion at least – hadn’t actually said anything to warrant such an attack. Granted the supposedly implacable Frenchman was not above getting down and dirty with comments slung – and in fact had recently suggested Chelsea’s negative tactics was ‘a danger to the sport’ – but when asked if the Blues’ draw to Everton opened the door a touch for their title rivals Wenger had responded evenly.
“A little bit of the belief has gone,” he claimed, which gave Arsenal and co “a little hope”. This was later misquoted – purposely or otherwise – when relayed back to Mourinho as an allusion to Chelsea being in psychological crisis.
If the Portuguese scowler must take full responsibility for surpassing what is acceptable in the infantile tit-for-tat of ‘mind games’ that is so rife in the modern game then the media too have culpability. Considering that a spurned handshake on 90 minutes can prompt a hundred outraged think-pieces you will find scant condemnation for the snide character assassination anywhere in the archives.
Conversely it has been gleefully repeated down the years to such an extent where it has entered football’s vocabulary. Arsene Wenger is a unique and extraordinary coach who redesigned English football for the better while winning three league titles along the way. And he’s a voyeur.
There is another moniker too that will always be saddled alongside his esteemed reputation that of being a ‘specialist in failure’, an equally pernicious put-down coined by the now United boss. In that instance Mourinho nailed it. He stuck to football and the phrase stuck to Wenger.
To intimate that a peer has a ‘sickness’ however was as inexcusable then as it is now.
[ad_pod ]