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Jose Mourinho

How do you feel about Mourinho appointment

  • Excited - silverware here we come baby

    Votes: 666 46.7%
  • Meh - will give him a chance and hope he is successful

    Votes: 468 32.8%
  • Horrified - praying for the day he'll fuck off

    Votes: 292 20.5%

  • Total voters
    1,426

dontcallme

SC Supporter
Mar 18, 2005
33,988
81,938
with a CL final thrown in.Some of the best nights I’ve had as a spurs fan in a very long time in that run. Yeah. Was horrific.
I think most people agree that overall Poch did a cracking job for us.

But we can't ignore the awful league form that last the whole of 2019 and it didn't appear that he was going to turn it around.
 

yido_number1

He'll always be magic
Jun 8, 2004
8,646
16,809
Yeah 25 points from 24 games is a "bump."
You need to put it in context. We finished fourth in the league and made the champions league final during that bump. In a season we played mostly at Wembley and then in an unfamiliar new home ground. We also signed no new players for two transfer windows and lost our number 1 midfielder Dembele to transfer and Harry Kane our best player for a lot of games to injury. Given all of this I think we probably overachieved last year. Yes the form wasn't great overall but Poch wasn't solely to blame for that. Show me another manager that has made a champions league final and finished 4th after signing no new players for a year ever?

Easy to throw that number out there but is the context that brings it to life. Klopps year the season before they won the champions league was 4th place and champions league final losers.
 

RikkiRocket

Well-Known Member
Jul 21, 2015
1,605
3,277
I think most people agree that overall Poch did a cracking job for us.

But we can't ignore the awful league form that last the whole of 2019 and it didn't appear that he was going to turn it around.

So for 1/5 of his time he had a blip. In that 1/5 we had a CL final.
 

bubble07

Well-Known Member
Dec 27, 2004
22,959
29,896
Every question he answers feels like the perfect response. Imagine Poch being asked about Eriksens contract? He would have gone on the defensive. Mourinho answered it perfectly
 

dontcallme

SC Supporter
Mar 18, 2005
33,988
81,938
You need to put it in context. We finished fourth in the league and made the champions league final during that bump. In a season we played mostly at Wembley and then in an unfamiliar new home ground. We also signed no new players for two transfer windows and lost our number 1 midfielder Dembele to transfer and Harry Kane our best player for a lot of games to injury. Given all of this I think we probably overachieved last year. Yes the form wasn't great overall but Poch wasn't solely to blame for that. Show me another manager that has made a champions league final and finished 4th after signing no new players for a year ever?

Easy to throw that number out there but is the context that brings it to life. Klopps year the season before they won the champions league was 4th place and champions league final losers.
Last season I was more than happy to ignore our poor performances and league form.

We hadn't signed any players, we had injuries, world cup hangover, played most of the season at Wembley etc. I believed these factors added together to be the reason for our poor performances.

Then we had the summer with some good signings and none of the above being a factor. The poor performances continued and numerous stories from ITK and other sources suggesting the atmosphere inside the club was becoming very toxic and several stars including possibly Kane ready to leave.

I have huge respect for Poch and accept that he managed us through a very difficult period.

However, he didn't manage the situation well and there was no sign that he was going to turn it around.

I followed up with my next post that overall Poch did a cracking job so why you're trying to convince me he did a good job is beyond me.
 
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Primativ

Well-Known Member
Aug 9, 2017
3,229
12,486
We might have just dispatched with our Ferguson. United famously nearly pulled the trigger on sacking him, but they didn't and the rest is history. We hit our first bump in the road with Poch and he got the flick. Two wins later, were in 5th and all appears well.

Good luck to Mourinho, it'll be great if we maintain or exceed recent seasons. But we all know no bumps in the road allowed.


It was more than a bump in the road with Poch, we crashed into a brick wall. Poch isn't and never will be an Alex Ferguson, he simply isn't as talented a manager. Ferguson was unique.

I firmly believe if Poch was as special as some people claim, he would have won at least one trophy of some sort over the last 5 years. We had an extremely good side, yet constantly lost to rivals in big games, Poch constantly got done over tactically by better managers. He can't be that special can he?
 

GMI

G.
Dec 13, 2006
3,091
12,128
Every question he answers feels like the perfect response. Imagine Poch being asked about Eriksens contract? He would have gone on the defensive. Mourinho answered it perfectly
He did......but if you kept asking him about Eriksens contract over 12 months worth of press conferences his responses may become similarly defensive.
 

dudu

Well-Known Member
Jan 28, 2011
5,314
11,048
It was more than a bump in the road with Poch, we crashed into a brick wall. Poch isn't and never will be an Alex Ferguson, he simply isn't as talented a manager. Ferguson was unique.

I firmly believe if Poch was as special as some people claim, he would have won at least one trophy of some sort over the last 5 years. We had an extremely good side, yet constantly lost to rivals in big games, Poch constantly got done over tactically by better managers. He can't be that special can he?

At 47 years old Ferguson took Man United to 11th in the league.

Poch has plenty of time to achieve things.

Edit, add to that Poch has also out done the same better managers you speak of too.... Pep - check, Klopp, Check - we beat them all.
 

spursfan77

Well-Known Member
Aug 13, 2005
46,680
104,957
Thanks for posting @spursfan77 but could you actually post the whole lot, including the "bad" parts?

INTERNAZIONALE (June 2008 to May 2010)

Marco Materazzi was in the doldrums, reeling from Italy’s quarter-final elimination from Euro 2008, when he received his first communication from Mourinho. It was a message telling him, “I’m waiting for you so we can start winning together.”

Materazzi was approaching his 35th birthday and had already won three Serie A titles, as well as the World Cup, but Mourinho wanted to challenge the defender and the rest of a highly experienced Inter squad. In one team talk, he questioned the value of those previous three Scudettos — the first of them a gift, after Juventus were stripped of the title due to the Calciopoli scandal, and the next two largely devoid of significance because their rivals were at a low ebb. This time, he told them, they were going to push themselves to the maximum and win things his way.

Looking back, that 2009-10 season, his second in Milan, represented peak Mourinho — and with an archetypal Mourinho team. By signing players such as Lucio, Thiago Motta, Goran Pandev and Diego Milito and drawing on the strength of Materazzi, Walter Samuel, Javier Zanetti, Esteban Cambiasso, he had a team that he felt would go to war for him. They held off a strong challenge from Roma to win yet another Scudetto, but his greatest achievement came in the Champions League, where they beat Chelsea and, famously, Pep Guardiola’s Barcelona en route to the final, where Bayern Munich fell victim to a classic counter-attacking performance.

Materazzi was once asked by Gazzetta dello Sport to sum up Mourinho’s strengths: drive, cleverness, knowledge, experience and empathy, he said. Empathy? “That’s the first thing he seeks out with his team,” the former Italy defender said, “the condition that is absolutely necessary to build a strong group, one that is united and has no cracks. That’s what leads you to fight against everything and everyone.”

It is debatable whether Mourinho has ever managed to establish that same level of “empathy” over the nine-and-a-half years since. It was a big, powerful, battle-hardened team. The 14 players who appeared in the Champions League final included Zanetti and Materazzi (both 36), Lucio and Samuel (both 32), Dejan Stankovic (31), Julio Cesar and Milito (30), Chivu, Cambiasso and Samuel Eto’o (29). The other four players were aged between 25 and 28. It was not a team that had been assembled with the long-term future in mind, but Mourinho did not need to worry about that as he left for Madrid. He had delivered.

Apart from the Italian Super Cup, the UEFA Cup and the FIFA Club World Cup the following season, Inter haven’t won a trophy since and, while botched managerial appointments, an erratic transfer policy and the Juventus revival are significant factors, it seems clear that the success under Mourinho came at a cost.

Massimo Moratti, the club’s former president, once said that Mourinho had “betrayed” Inter, “like a husband cheating on his wife”, but of course there were no regrets about appointing him. That was their only European Cup win since Hellenio Herrera’s Grande Inter of the mid-1960s. Would Moratti have done it all over again with Mourinho? Absolutely. Again and again and again.

REAL MADRID (May 2010 to June 2013)

Graham Hunter’s book Barca: The Making of the World’s Greatest Team contains a wonderful story about Barcelona interviewing Mourinho in 2008 for the job that they later gave to Guardiola.

Over the course of a three-hour interview with Txiki Begiristain and Marc Ingla, who were Barcelona’s technical director and vice-president respectively, Mourinho outlined his devotion to 4-3-3 and his admiration for the club’s Cruyffian philosophy. A PowerPoint presentation left a strong and entirely positive impression. “But he wouldn’t listen,” according to Ingla in Hunter’s book. “I said to him, ‘Jose, the problem we have is you push the media too much. There is too much aggression. The coach is the image of the club, so you can’t start fires everywhere. This is against our style.’”

“I know,” Mourinho replied. “That is my style. I won’t change.”

So Guardiola got the job — and you could say the rest is history. Barcelona’s superiority over the next two seasons was so great that the Real president Florentino Perez, having spent so heavily on players such as Cristiano Ronaldo, Kaka, Karim Benzema and Xabi Alonso, was willing to put any reservation about personality or image aside. Mourinho was hired to break what threatened to be a new cycle of Barcelona domination in La Liga and the Champions League. Whether he achieved that is open to debate.

In Mourinho’s first season, Real finished second in La Liga, scoring 102 goals but finishing four points behind Barcelona. They won the Copa del Rey, beating Barcelona in a bad-tempered final, but that was scant consolation for defeat by Guardiola’s team in the Champions League semi-final. What is more, a combination of defensive tactics, ugly challenges, cynical behaviour — not just on the pitch but on the touchline — damaged Real’s image. That moment in August 2011 when Mourinho jabbed Guardiola’s assistant Tito Villanova in the eye was the nadir for a club over a three-year period in which, to borrow Ingla’s phrase, Mourinho started fires everywhere.

Gerard Pique, the Barcelona defender, said that the rivalry had escalated out of control since Mourinho arrived. He said it was “destroying Spanish football”, which was quite a claim at a time when the national team had just won their second consecutive tournament. “There is talk about the Catalans, but the problem is with Madrid. I think it’s going too far,” he said.

Real did break Barcelona’s dominance of La Liga, though. They racked up record-breaking totals of 121 league goals and 100 points in 2011-12, finishing nine points clear of Guardiola’s hallowed Barcelona team. When Mourinho is trumpeting his great achievements, something he is never shy of doing, that one should figure prominently — yes, even above that Manchester United runners-up spot that he holds so dear.

It ended in tears, though — a classic case of Mourinho third-season syndrome — as he fell out with Iker Casillas, Sergio Ramos, Pepe, Ronaldo and others, including some of the coaching staff. By the end of that third campaign, the atmosphere was toxic. His departure at the end of that campaign could probably best be described as being by mutual contempt.

The Champions League brought frustration, with three semi-final defeats, but Mourinho feels he laid the foundations for the successes that were to follow (one under Carlo Ancelotti, three under Zinedine Zidane). “If you’re in a club one or two years — or any job — and you leave a structure to be even more successful without you than with you, that’s not short-term,” he told The Times in 2017.

He left on good terms with Perez — so much so that the president considered reappointing him last season, before turning back to Zidane instead. The president describes Mourinho as a “a coach of character who brought to us a lot in terms of competitiveness, particularly in the Champions League”. On balance, Perez seems to look back on the era with fondness — though nothing like as much satisfaction, it is fair, to say as Barcelona reserve for the moment they rejected Mourinho in favour of Guardiola.

CHELSEA (June 2013 to December 2015)

Never go back, they say. Well, if it was good enough for Burton and Taylor, it was good enough for Mourinho and Abramovich. Just two days after his final game in charge of Real Madrid, he was back at Stamford Bridge, trying to tell the world that he still had all of his most appealing qualities as a manager and had smoothed some of his rough edges. “Humble,” is how he described himself. “More stable, more mature.”

It lasted two-and-a-half years. Or, to put it another way, it blew up just after he signed a highly lucrative new contract, just as it did in Madrid, just as it would at United. Why does that keep happening? He was all charm and smiles when he arrived, but by the time he was sacked in December 2015, just seven months after leading them to the Premier League title, they were just a point above the relegation zone and the atmosphere in the dressing room was corrosive. Palpable discord indeed.

“I was glad he came back, but it wasn’t quite the same second time,” Rolls says. “First time around, he transformed the club. The second time, we were already established as a trophy-winning club. We’d won so many trophies — won the double under Ancelotti, the Champions League under [Roberto] Di Matteo — so it wasn’t the same kind of challenge. But he still won trophies, including another Premier League. He showed again that he’s a trophy-gatherer.”

Second time, he was rehired with a wider brief. At his first press conference he spoke about the need to rebuild the squad, which would involve phasing out Petr Cech, Ashley Cole and Frank Lampard before the start of his second season. He achieved that with some success, but the talents of Kevin De Bruyne, Romelu Lukaku and, later, Mo Salah and so many homegrown youngsters were neglected. Those players required more patience and indulgence than a manager like Mourinho was ever likely to show.

“He didn’t take the long-term view,” Rolls says. “He came in — bish, bash, bosh — won the Premier League and then started falling out with people. It seemed pretty toxic by the end. It was a shame it ended like that, but it just seems like he’s a manager with a natural lifespan of two to three years at a club.”

Even before his appointment at Tottenham, the lingering affection of the Chelsea fans had been strained by his move to Manchester United and by his eagerness to play the pantomime villain on his return to Stamford Bridge. “You’re not special any more,” the Chelsea fans chanted, while some of them taunted him as “Judas”.

In a post-match press conference, he pointed out that he had won three Premier League titles with Chelsea and “until the moment they have a manager that wins four, (…) Judas is number one.”

MANCHESTER UNITED (May 2016 to December 2018)

As the months have passed, a strange sort of nostalgia has begun to take hold of Mourinho’s legacy at United. Was it really quite so bad? Back at Old Trafford on punditry duty for the opening weekend of this season, he was serenaded by the home crowd and booed by some of the Chelsea fans, which, when you consider his place in the history of both clubs, is more than a little odd.

On one hand, he led United to the League Cup and Europa League in his first season and finished second in the Premier League in year two, which he continues to cite as one of his great achievements. On the other, he spent £420 million in the transfer market (£310 million net) without ever threatening to develop any real sense of long-term progression. The football was pragmatic at best, turgid at worst and, while the same can certainly be said of performances under Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, the persistent rot does not reflect well on the job done by the man whom Woodward, the executive vice-chairman, giddily lauded as “quite simply the best manager in the world today”.

Mourinho was quite simply not the best manager in Manchester. The squad he inherited was not as enviable, the budget not as great and the recruitment operation nothing like as sophisticated as City’s (Woodward: “Mino Raiola’s been on again”), but his work paled by comparison with Guardiola’s across town and indeed Jurgen Klopp’s at Liverpool. Guardiola took players as diverse as Fernandinho, David Silva, De Bruyne and Raheem Sterling and helped them produce the best form of their life. It is hard to think of a single player of whom that could be said under Mourinho at United.

The criticism from former United players, such as Paul Scholes and Roy Keane, was almost incessant. For the first season and a half, Mourinho objected to negative appraisals of his players and particularly Paul Pogba. He even suggested that Scholes’s criticism of Pogba was fuelled by wage envy — and then, a few weeks later, once his patience snapped, he began to scold the France midfielder both privately and publicly, a dysfunctional, damaging relationship that was to sour Mourinho’s final year in charge.

Meira, who played under him at Benfica, feels that the blame lay with Mourinho’s players. “Some people don’t understand how he didn’t have success at Manchester United,” Meira says. “Manchester United is a great club, and Mourinho a great coach, but you need great players and great personalities and he didn’t have that. No one at the level of a Rio Ferdinand, a Roy Keane, a Paul Scholes, a Ryan Giggs. That makes an enormous difference to the attitude of the group. The players clearly didn’t want to win for Mourinho — and that is really ugly. Happily, what goes around comes around and you see now that Manchester United are nowhere in the English league.”

Ouch. The problem is that this narrative — “the players clearly didn’t want to win for him” — has attached itself to Mourinho again and again over the nine years since Inter. Just as Woodward and the players are recurring factors in United’s failures under various managers, Mourinho is quite clearly the recurring factor in the third-season breakdowns that have led to his departures from his past three jobs. Does he push players too hard? Does he get disenchanted? Is that make-up of the modern footballer anathema to a man whose teams have been built on unswerving types such as Ricardo Carvalho, Terry, Lampard, Lucio and Zanetti?

It was a marriage of convenience and not a particularly joyful one, but at least some measure of gratitude remains. “Mourinho was the most successful manager we’ve had since Ferguson retired,” Scott Patterson, of the Republik of Mancunia website said. “His reign wasn’t particularly enjoyable for the fans, but it had its moments, like Stockholm [the Europa League final] or coming back from 2-0 down to delay City’s title-winning party, with the ‘We did it on derby day’ T-shirts getting binned. Had he been backed in his final transfer window, things may well have been different. But that told him that his days were numbered, despite just finishing second, so he hit the self-destruct button.”

Any regrets? “I don’t regret us having him as our manager, but I don’t look back on that period with particularly fond memories either,” Patterson says. Neither, you suspect, does Mourinho, but he said this week of the experience that in life, you never lose. You win or you learn. “And at United I won and I learned,” he said.
 

Primativ

Well-Known Member
Aug 9, 2017
3,229
12,486
At 47 years old Ferguson took Man United to 11th in the league.

Poch has plenty of time to achieve things.

Edit, add to that Poch has also out done the same better managers you speak of too.... Pep - check, Klopp, Check - we beat them all.

Deary me. What a ridiculous post. Come back to me when Poch achieves more than one of them.
 
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