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dontcallme

dontcallme

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Mar 18, 2005
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Gb160 said:
Shush and go and get me some articles.
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Even as recently as a week ago, the weekend of November 23 had an altogether different look for Jose Mourinho.
He had originally been expecting to spend it flying to Africa, having been pencilled in to visit Madagascar with Gianni Infantino, the FIFA president. The itinerary had Mourinho and Infantino landing in Madagascar on Sunday night before meeting the country’s president Andry Rajoelina on Monday, seeing the Malagasy Football Federation and inspecting football facilities before flying off on Tuesday.
But Mourinho did not spend Sunday in Madagascar. He spent it in at Tottenham Hotspur’s training ground in Enfield, reviewing his first game as Spurs manager — a 3-2 win at London rivals West Ham United — and preparing to face Olympiakos on Tuesday. Win that game and his new club will qualify for the Champions League knockout stages.
Doing that would round off a pretty satisfying first week in the job.
There was a particularly eerie atmosphere among the squad that Mauricio Pochettino built when they learnt that their maker had been sacked.
Every player at the club was either signed by Pochettino, transformed by his coaching, or both. Five and a half years is an epoch in modern football and Tottenham as a club are totally unrecognisable now from the days when Tim Sherwood was in charge and the main question was how to get the most out of Roberto Soldado, Paulinho and Emmanuel Adebayor.
“It’s a strange feeling,” reflects Toby Alderweireld as he spoke to The Athletic on Saturday afternoon, after the start of the next Tottenham era. “You’re loyal to your old manager. We have to be very grateful and thankful to him, where he brought us. It is a strange feeling when the manager where you’ve been for five years is leaving and suddenly, you have another manager. But sometimes, that’s football.”
And as soon as Jose Mourinho entered the building on Wednesday morning, he started to make an impression on people. Everyone knows about Mourinho’s reputation, the authoritarian who exhausts his players after two years of work, the man who will say or do anything to get a rise out of a rival.
But he is also capable of being incredibly charming when he wants to be, and that is how he was when he was introduced to people for the first time on Wednesday. Joking with staff about getting his club uniform sorted, putting them at ease by talking about his family, he was unfailingly personable and friendly with everyone he met. That was the first thing that stood out to those that met him. The other thing was his focus.
Mourinho first met with his players on Wednesday just before training to tell them that they were better than they looked. Mourinho acknowledged that he had competed against this team in the past, with Chelsea and Manchester United, but said he was no longer their enemy, but their family instead. “I will be your father, friend, girlfriend, whatever you want,” he said, according to reports in Portugal. He promised to do everything to help the players.
The goal for this season is to finish in the top four. Mourinho showed the players the Premier League table, with Spurs stuck in 14th, and told them they were far better than that. And it registered. “He believed in us, he believed in the team,” Toby Alderweireld said after Saturday’s game.
“He’s a winning guy. I think he will help us a lot,” Lucas Moura told The Athletic. “He tries to give confidence for everyone and to change our mentality, putting in our minds that we are very good players, that we are very strong, and we can win big things. And we believe that. We work to win trophies this season.”
Had Mauricio Pochettino taken training on Wednesday, it would have been in the morning, but it was pushed back to the afternoon so that Mourinho could take it instead. The training ground had not been a happy place in recent months, with the players feeling increasingly distant from Pochettino, sensing that his enthusiasm had waned, finding themselves with nothing left in the tank for those demanding double sessions, looking forward to those rare days off.
But speak to those who know the Spurs dressing room best and they say that the change in mood Mourinho has delivered was instant. “Jose has brought so much energy to training already,” says one source. “They felt they had reached the dead end in the road under Pochettino.” The players knew that after 25 points in their last 24 league games, no away league win in 10 months, the whole place needed a freshening up. And, according to another source, that is precisely what they feel they have got.
Mourinho took training on Wednesday afternoon, along with his new team of assistants. Joao Sacramento always stood out at Lille for his ability to run sessions in French, Spanish and Portuguese, and here he was barking out instructions in English. Ricardo Formosinho, their tactical analyst, formerly part of Mourinho’s staff at Manchester United, helped to run a series of short sharp drills. Nuno Santos, who, like Sacramento joined from Lille, took the goalkeeping drills.
There were individual meetings with the senior players too, as Mourinho took the most important men aside to start working on them. He had his already-famous conversation with Dele Alli, asking the 23-year-old if he was Dele, or his brother, and telling him to play like his old self again, a conversation that was already bearing fruit by lunchtime on Saturday.
On Wednesday night, Mourinho stayed so long at Spurs’ training ground that he did not want to drive back through the traffic of central London to his home in Belgravia afterwards. So with his staff, he decided instead to stay at the on-site accommodation at Hotspur Way. “If you are trying to find a six-star hotel, you could not find better than here,” he explained the next day.
And Mourinho is right. A typical room at the lodge has a super kingsize bed, four kingsize pillows and another four comfortable cushions. “Amazing to sleep in the middle of five or six huge soft pillows, and an expensive duvet” Mourinho said. These are rooms designed to give players the best possible rest and sleep before games, with top-of-the-range memory foam bedding, coffee machines and fruit bowls in every room. Mourinho and his team got up early to start work at 7am on Thursday.
There was an unusual hush in the Tottenham training ground press room before Jose Mourinho walked in just after 2pm on Thursday afternoon. The previous day, Mourinho had been in there, recording his welcome video for Spurs fans, looking impeccably corporate in black suit, black tie and button-down white shirt.
Back then, the room was empty, save from Mourinho and the club staff interviewing him. This time, the room was the busiest it has ever been. There were reporters and camera crews from all over the world and organisations had been limited to one representative each. Even before the Champions League semi-final just a few months ago, it wasn’t quite as packed as this. And yet it was also, for those few seconds, the quietest it has ever been. As soon as Mourinho walked down the stairs, across the lobby and through the heavy wooden door he noticed it too. “Big silence,” he said. “I must prepare for difficult questions.”
This time, Mourinho was not wearing a sharp suit but a gilet and training gear, looking like a man determined to show he was here to work, not just perform on stage. But he gave a performance regardless, speaking to journalists for almost an hour, displaying all the old skills that made him so famous. He was witty, authoritative, imaginative and memorable. “They have to see me as Mr Inter, Mr Real Madrid, Mr Porto,” he said, when asked how Spurs fans would take to him. “They have to see me as Mr Club.”

After burning out so badly in his last three jobs, Mourinho is determined to be different at Tottenham, more relaxed, less confrontational. He was determined to make that clear to the world, uttering variations on “I am humble” or “I was always humble” five times, even though that is the type of statement that loses its punch when said out loud. He was also keen to remind people where possible of his achievements so far, referring to what he calls the ‘Grand Slam’ of winning the English, Spanish and Italian league titles. When asked about the mental effect of Spurs losing the Champions League final, he replied: “I don’t know because I never lost a Champions League final.” He did not need to spell out that he has won it twice.
As he walked through Tottenham’s training ground, he may have nodded in agreement upon seeing a quote from the club’s most successful manager, Bill Nicholson, hung on the wall. It reads: “Any player coming to Spurs, whether he’s a big signing or just a ground staff boy, must be dedicated to the game and to the club. He must be prepared to work at his game. He must never be satisfied with his last performance, and he must hate losing.”
Mourinho, who hates losing more than most, spoke for 40 minutes in the first press conference and then went upstairs for a second session of almost 20 minutes with written journalists. After that, he did interviews with BT Sport and Sky Sports News. By the end of it all, he was tired but he was also back exactly where he wanted to be after almost one year out of the spotlight.
Watching this long performance, it was impossible to avoid the conclusion that Mourinho is bigger than the club he now manages. Even though he said that it was all about “club vision, club objectives” rather than “Mourinho vision, Mourinho objectives”, it simply did not feel that way. Mourinho is, by orders of magnitude, the most successful and most famous manager ever to take charge of this club. This, judging by the number of journalists in the room, the clicks and new follows on social media, the attending Amazon cameras, for whom Mourinho wore his own separate microphone, was the biggest media day in Tottenham’s history.
For years, the story at Tottenham has been one of ambition and aspiration, of hoping to work their way into the elite. Pochettino got them closer than anyone, but maybe not quite close enough. Now they have the most globally successful manager in modern football. That is an instant transformation.
Mourinho took his third training session at Spurs on Friday afternoon, giving his players their final pointers before the West Ham game, fully aware of the importance of creating the right atmosphere. He sensed that his players were not fully at ease around him yet, that they were not playing their music as loudly as they would do if they felt comfortable. “On Friday, in the dressing room, I felt that they were a bit like… they [didn’t] know if I liked their music in the dressing room,” he reflected on Saturday. “The music at the training ground was low. ‘Maybe this guy doesn’t allow, or doesn’t like?’” The new manager wanted his players to relax.
He knew that he could not change too much of the fundamentals of Pochettino’s game, the philosophy that had been hard-wired into these players over the last five and a half years. Instead, he could only make tweaks. The team would play in a conventional 4-2-3-1, no more experimentation with a diamond. Eric Dier would come back in to holding midfield. Paolo Gazzaniga would be encouraged to kick long from the back, rather than always building through the back.
“Some details, of how we want to play when we have the possession, when they have the possession,” Alderweireld told The Athletic on Saturday when asked about the difference between Pochettino and Mourinho. “He said we don’t have a lot of time to prepare for the West Ham game, and let’s do our best.” The squad stayed together at the training ground on Friday night, as they traditionally do before games in London, before driving down to the London Stadium on Saturday morning.
It began with a wink to the doorman, a smile to a steward, and high fives along the line of mascots, all but one clad in West Ham shirts, as they shivered just inside the players’ entrance to the London Stadium.
“Hey boys, you good? It’s cold, eh?”
Mourinho even doubled back to fist bump those at the front of the queue whom he had missed first time round.
“See you later, boys.”
Then, designer label coat clasped in his left hand and leather backpack flung over his right shoulder, he strode off purposefully into the bowels of the arena with a nod, “morning” or handshake to acknowledge virtually everyone he came across en route. It was as if he was back among old friends, not venturing into enemy territory.
The Athletic understands that Mourinho had a microphone attached to him when he entered referee Michael Oliver’s office at the London Stadium. It is not always protocol for the manager to enter the office for the captain’s briefing from the official before the game but Mourinho made a point of dropping by. When he inquired as to whether Oliver would be comfortable with him wearing a microphone during the game, the official suggested this would not be appropriate.
The Premier League are then believed to have intervened to advise the Tottenham manager that he should not wear a microphone during the game, as this could potentially be unfair if Mourinho was to engage in any dispute with rival coaches or fourth officials.
There are also economic concerns, as Amazon’s deal is exclusively with Tottenham but it would be other clubs who in this case become unwitting participants and contribute to creating the drama and therefore the monetary gain. It is understood that as part of Mourinho’s deal with Tottenham he indicated he would be willing to open up his methods to Amazon and this could even include having a microphone attached during training sessions.
By the end of the game, as the music blared out in the visitors’ dressing room to the raucous whoops of players celebrating a first away win in the Premier League for 307 days, this really did feel like a home from home. Mourinho’s smirk was born of satisfaction. It reflected a job well done, with as many points secured on debut as his predecessor had managed in the team’s last 12 games on their travels.
“A victory is something that you have to value. The boys worked hard in these two days, and again today. So the music was loud in there. I don’t care what kind of music it was. I just like the feeling the boys are happy.” The first step on Tottenham’s road to recovery was rejoiced to the thud of an electronic beat.
Mourinho insisted he had not found this an overly emotional experience. There had apparently been no pre-match nerves to occupy his mind on that morning crawl round London’s orbital road from Spurs’ training ground to the Olympic Park. But, had his thoughts drifted then to how his first day back in top-level management for 11 months might pan out, he probably could not have scripted this better.
It was as if the Premier League had flung down the red carpet to herald his return, not least with the choice of opponent. West Ham were such obliging hosts, from those mascots with their innocent welcome, via the autograph and selfie hunters behind the dug-out during the warm-up, to the home players in the tunnel as they filed past Tottenham’s new manager pre-match while the bubble machines were still being cranked up outside.
He shared a laugh with Issa Diop and Felipe Anderson, clasped hands with Roberto, forever ensuring he was visible. At the centre of it all. West Ham, as if mesmerised, simply played along. There was nothing uncomfortable about any of it. Nothing vaguely hostile.
And to think this was a derby, the kind of fixture which would have had the ground beneath the players’ feet trembling to the ferocious boom of the crowd back at the Boleyn Ground. Mourinho must have sensed the underlying dread around the place, and realised this contest was there for the taking.

Rewind 14 months and it had been his own Manchester United who had arrived in these parts a team apparently braced to be beaten well before kick-off. Manuel Pellegrini and his staff had been astonished at how meek their visitors had been that afternoon, hardly bothering to press and lacking both invention and enterprise to wound West Ham. Here, though, it was the home side guilty of a tentative mess of a performance until they were chasing an unassailable deficit late on.
That was damning, not least because it would have been easy for ‘new manager bounce’ not to apply. The excuses were readily available. Spurs’ international players had only returned in dribs and drabs over the 48 hours of Mourinho’s tenure. There had been precious little time for the new man and his staff to implement new tactical plans and ideas, or even contemplate radical selections.
Yes, Joao Sacramento appeared to have them drilling to a tweaked pre-match warm-up, a tight game of keep-ball within a taped-off area, but the Portuguese was essentially pinning hopes on simplifying the structure, some calmly delivered pre-match words of encouragement and his own upbeat presence to remind his players of their qualities. He was determined to be a source of reassurance.
To that end, he found it hard to settle in that opening half-hour while Tottenham’s incision threatened but did not yield reward. Six times he embarked upon the hefty trek from his seat in the dugout to the far edge of the technical area to survey the scene from across the carpeted running track, biting his bottom lip with hands sunk deep in pockets.
He applauded even overhit passes — from Eric Dier out of play for a goal kick early on, or Serge Aurier, wastefully and under no discernible pressure – and seized every opportunity to speak with those Spurs players closest to him during breaks in play. When he retreated back to his seat, out came the Montblanc pen and gold-trimmed notepad as he scribbled observations to be revisited at the break.
Perhaps the only discernible change in approach was a slightly more direct style, whether via Paulo Gazzaniga’s goal kicks or the back line’s distribution. There was an urgency to Spurs’ play, a desire to shift the ball quicker up the pitch to Lucas Moura and Dele Alli, effectively playing as inside-forwards. “For almost five years, we have tried to play out from the back but now we are trying something new,” said Son Heung-min. “We have to fight for the second ball, and we adapted well.”
Mourinho clearly recognises the South Korean’s energy as a prime asset. Where Aurier marauded regularly up the right flank, Ben Davies almost tucked inside as a supplementary centre-back at times to clog up the middle, always-confident Son, clinging to the touchline, would be industrious enough to influence play at both ends of the pitch. When the forward ripped a shot beyond Roberto to force the visitors ahead, Mourinho turned and punched the air before enveloping Joao in a bear hug.
 
dontcallme

dontcallme

SC Supporter
Mar 18, 2005
34,355
83,684
There was even more satisfaction to be had in his team’s second, the head coach turning to face his bench before sinking to his knees, a blur of double fist-pumps. “It was too hard to slide,” he said. “But it wasn’t just passion. We did something (on the pitch) that we did in training, Lucas arriving in that position. For a coach, for my staff, we thought about it, prepared it, trained it, so when it happens… that’s the best feeling for a coach.”
Even so, he was swiftly up again to praise the one instinctive piece of improvised brilliance in the move. Dele Alli’s hooked pass down the line while floored on the touchline was exquisitely executed. “Dele, that’s you. You’re the man.” Alli has revived of late, even in a team playing within themselves, but this was a player properly unleashed. “Dele is too good not to be in the national team, too good not to be one of the best in the world,” said Mourinho. “The best Dele has to be back.”
He is already coaxing plenty from the 23-year-old, and will have spied evidence of the potential of this team. At first glance, their third goal almost appeared too simple, the manager’s celebration reflecting disbelief at how easy it had been to prise West Ham apart but in truth, it had been slickly constructed and emphatically converted by Harry Kane.
Then came the self-inflicted jitters, the first-hand evidence of Spurs’ fragility as concentration levels dipped and the hosts belatedly stirred. Mourinho crouched through those latter stages, some of the steely aggression of old flashing across his face at each clearance or break away, before punching the air at the final whistle even if, by then, the margin of victory had become deceptively tight.
The post-match back slaps and high fives on the pitch — players trooping past their new manager, who acknowledged each in turn — were carried out to a chorus of delight from the travelling support, who had finally taken to bellowing his name in unison.
“It’s about the players, it’s not about me,” Mourinho said in the last of that draining succession of post-match interviews on Saturday afternoon. “I made no impact, nothing. I just helped them a little bit to win this match.”
No one believed that. This had been his week, his return to the limelight. Humble might be pushing it, but Spurs are already benefiting from his presence.
 
tototoner

tototoner

Staying Alert
Mar 21, 2004
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danielneeds said:
Has anyone seen the thread on The Athletic website taking a massive load of the leading UK footie writers and they’ll stick them behind a paywall?



They’ve got David Ornstein, Daniel Taylor, Oliver Kay, and loads of others.

Gonna be quite the shake up of football reporting. I’ll be interested to see what their subscription package is like.
Click to expand...


that link doesn't work for me
 
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