Originally Posted by RichmondBlue:
“Yes, I'm a Chelsea fan..well spotted. But I'm also not so prejudiced that I can't recognise someone who has reached the top of their profession. Mourinho is one of the finest managers currently operating in the game, his record speaks for itself.
It's the term "anti-football" that perhaps touched a nerve, along with the usual "parking the bus" nonsense that is so loved by the tabloids and ignorant phone-in programmes.”
Mourinho has never succeeded in his entire career without obliterating the opposition with money and/or having an existing squad of expensive talent at his disposal from day one - the epitome of the chequebook manager. He has never turned a club around from the doldrums and built anything or brought through untried youth to any degree - it's all about him and not the future of the club. He's destroyed good players more often than he's coached rough diamonds to be stars.
He's always gone to clubs where the odds were stacked in his favour and there was already a foundation for success - IIRC he's only ever improved a club's position by one or two places since he began his managerial career. Mancini was 1'000% correct to point out that Mourinho succeeded on the back of his work at Inter. The only two occasions he didn't have a massive competitive advantage over his main rival or rivals - at Real and his second spell at Chelsea - he's failed.
He was extraordinarily lucky to win both his Champions League titles. Critical decisions went incorrectly in his favour - for example against Manchester United in his first winning campaign and against Barcelona in his second. In his win with Porto he was doubly lucky in that an excellent Milan side had one of those bizarre days and surrendered a 4-0 aggregate lead to Deportivo, allowing Mourinho to face a relatively weak team in the Semis. As for the final - well Monaco were simply appalling.
The idea that the media are against Mourinho is ridiculous. He gets such an easy ride here it's untrue - ridiculous documentaries, fawning over his "Special One" self-promoting antics and so on. The media in Spain and Italy - not to mention the public - are far less sucked in by the myth than they are here.
On top of all that is his odious behaviour - egotistical self-promotion, slagging off the St. John's ambulance Brigade and physically attacking an opposition coach to name but three examples. If I never see him duping the gullible with ostentatious note-taking on the sidelines to make himself look like Rinus Michels again it'll be too soon.
Anyway this is way off - topic, so I'll leave this for another time and another thread.