ImagesGetty Images; PABelow “You’re not
playing until you
say sorry, all right?”talk to him, saying, ‘Mario, don’t be so proud.’ There was no way to
convince him, but then we started getting close to the Champions
League semi-finals. We said, ‘Mario, are you going to lose all of
these matches because of pride?’ He finally called a truce and
spoke to Mourinho. Within a week, he was back in the squad.”
Balotelli, 19, came on as a substitute as Inter beat Barcelona 3-1
in the first leg of the semi-final. Barça, forced to travel to Milan by
bus, hadn’t been helped by the ash cloud blanketing Europe after
the eruption of Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajokull, but they were
simply outmanoeuvred by Mourinho that night.
“Everything was around not letting Lionel Messi play,” the
manager later said of his strategy. “After the game, the press used
the word gabbia – a jail – for Messi, because we didn’t play man-
to-man. Javier Zanetti, Thiago Motta, Esteban Cambiasso –
everyone was responsible for any position that Messi could go
into. Then the strategy was to hurt them by going strongly
with four or five players in attacking transition. We were at
home: we needed to win. It’s hard to say it when we had only
30 per cent possession, but we were totally in control.”
They were in control of the tie, too, even if their task in the
return leg was complicated by Motta’s 28th-minute dismissal
at the Camp Nou. From there, the visitors produced one of
the most remarkable backs-to-the-wall performances in
Champions League history.
“People claimed Mourinho was a defensive-minded manager,
but after winning the first leg 3-1, why would we need to go to
the Camp Nou and beat them again?” Lucio asks FFT. “What we
mOURIn HO HAD TOLD BARÇA THEY WERE
WROn G TO APPOIn T GUARDIOLA In STEAD
OF HIm. n OW HE WAS CHARGIn G ACROSS
THE CAmP n OU PITCH, FIn GER In THE AIR
had to do was rely on what we’d done in the first 90 minutes, hold
the game and seal our place in the final – and that’s what we did.
It’s already very difficult to play there, so imagine that with a man
down. Were we going to attack them? Of course not. We defended
our goal.”
Defend it, they did. “We didn’t park the bus, we parked the
plane,” said Mourinho. Gerard Pique scored late on, but it wasn’t
enough. Two years earlier, Mourinho had told Barcelona they
were wrong to choose Pep Guardiola, not him, as their boss. Now
he was charging across the Camp Nou pitch, finger in the air,
having eliminated his former employers and led Inter to the final
at the Bernabeu.
In the home dressing room, an apoplectic Ibrahimovic ripped into
Guardiola – but Inter’s ageing squad had given their all for Mourinho.
Even Eto’o sublimated his ego to play as a virtual full-back late on.
Weeks later, Jose outwitted former Barcelona coach Louis van Gaal,
Inter beat Bayern Munich 2-0, and he had his second Champions
League trophy. “My greatest achievement? To win the Champions
League with Inter,” he has since said.REAL MADRID V S BORUSSIA DORTMUn D 2013
“In Spain, some people hate me”On the morning of his club’s Champions League semi-final at
Borussia Dortmund in 2013, Real Madrid president Florentino
Perez got into a conversation with some journalists at his hotel.
Madrid were 13 points behind Barcelona in the league, and
Mourinho’s relationship with the club’s stars had deteriorated.
Still, Perez backed his manager. If there was any issue, he told
the journalists, it was the fault of the players – Mourinho, now
nearing the end of his third season, had simply been trying to
shake them out of their complacency. It was difficult to
manage a team full of superstar egos, the president insisted,
whereas Dortmund were “a team of children” managed by
“a child’s coach”. Perez was convinced that Madrid would beat
Jurgen Klopp’s side.
He had hired Mourinho to finally deliver La Decima, Real
Madrid’s fabled 10th European Cup, in 2010. So relieved was
Perez by Inter’s victory over Barcelona – denying the CatalansFourFourTwo.com The Managers 81JOSE
MOURInHO