A cautionary tale for Jose Mourinho
Posted Thursday, February 02, 2012 by Supersport.com
At a time when the Leonardo DiCaprio movie "J. Edgar" is playing large at cinemas around the world, I liked the image of Jose Mourinho turning up in Marbella on his day off to spy on CSKA Moscow. Not that there was a hint of him looking for Communist Party sympathizers in the squad -- which will be Real Madrid's next opponent in the Champions League -- but the timing and synchronicity were just too delicious.
For those who neither follow social history nor cinema, J. Edgar Hoover was the FBI director who disliked left-wingers, liberals, exhibited a worrying degree of curiosity and, allegedly, was experimental in his clothing tastes. If you weren't with him, then you were most definitely against him, and you could expect a wiretap or a knock on the door.
Mourinho -- well, he obviously shows none of the above tendencies. In fact, Cristiano Ronaldo is functioning quite nicely on the left wing for Madrid these days.
But if you step back and adjust your sights from the short term (Madrid versus Getafe in La Liga this weekend) and try to put Mourinho's next few months in focus, the big question, even ahead of whether he will leave the Bernabeu for the Premier League in the summer, is what could possibly prevent him from adding the Spanish title to his bulging chest of silverware?
The hard fact is this: Only if Mourinho and his squad somehow tie their own shoelaces together is there any real prospect of them tripping up. One way for the coach to avoid that is to take in the Hoover movie and tell himself, "I won't do that, I won't do that."
It's as simple as that. Barcelona is Madrid's only rival for La Liga. Los Merengues have a merited seven-point lead; Mourinho has never squandered even a three-point lead atop the Portuguese, English or Italian championships; and Madrid possesses a significant advantage in fit, talented players right now.
It should be a shoo-in.
I know, I know -- Catalan cheerleaders will point out that this is precisely the kind of situation in which Johan Cruyff's Dream Team (with cerebral command in the hands of one Josep Guardiola, midfielder) used to consistently win the Spanish title in the 1990s. Twenty years ago, Guardiola won his first title when Barca beat Athletic Bilbao 2-0 on the last day of the season and Madrid conceded a lead and lost 3-2 in Tenerife. Twelve months later, Guardiola and Cruyff managed a 1-0 win over some more Basques, Real Sociedad, while Madrid lost 2-0 to the same opponent, Tenerife.
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