John Terry had already declined to talk about the sudden explosion of acrimony surrounding the departure of William Gallas — ”I’ll answer those questions back at Chelsea,” he said — when his response to an entirely different enquiry during his press conference in Skopje this week gave an insight into the latest rumpus involving his club.
Invited to discuss Jose Mourinho’s influence on the way he approaches the job of captaining a club side, he spoke about being made aware of the obligation to stick up for his teammates at all times, right or wrong — even when they, or he, came under attack from their Portuguese manager.
And had that happened?
”Oh, yes,” Terry replied. ”He does love a confrontation.”
Love it? Mourinho lives on it. His talent as a coach may have won him his job at Chelsea, but that combination of sultry looks and sulphurous temperament is what made him famous outside the boundaries of his sport, putting his face on billboards advertising cellphones and credit cards.
When he first came to the attention of English football fans, it was for the sneer he aimed at Sir Alex Ferguson while in the process of denying Manchester United a place in the last eight of the 2004 European Cup.
”I can understand him being a little sad,” Mourinho said that night in Porto, responding to Ferguson’s refusal to shake his hand, ”because his team were clearly dominated by a team who have maybe 10% of his budget.”
We wrote that down and, impressed by his feistiness, exchanged admiring nods. After two-and-a-half years of increasing familiarity, however, that same characteristic seems a lot less attractive, and the latest twist in the Gallas affair provides further evidence that Mourinho did not have a mother who taught him the most effective response to frustration or insult could be summed up in two words: ”Rise above.”
With him, we now recognise, no slight goes unreturned and no wound unavenged. His response to a bout of mud-slinging is to get down and scoop up handfuls of blacker, slimier, smellier mud with which to smear his opponent.
Barely had the stink dispersed from his monstrously egotistical outburst during Chelsea’s celebration of their second successive Premiership title than a cloud of noxious fumes again gathered around the club’s continuing efforts to tempt Ashley Cole from Arsenal.
Following months of tedious to-ing and fro-ing, the part-exchange of Cole for William Gallas was finally concluded last Thursday night, five minutes after the transfer deadline. But that was not to be the end of the affair.
Both sides, it seemed, had got what they wanted. True, Chelsea had been forced to transfer £5-million to their rivals’ account to balance the deal, but all the world is aware how little such a sum represents to Britain’s richest resident. And yet something had clearly annoyed Chelsea.
On Monday, via Roman Abramovich’s legal and media apparatchiks, they issued perhaps the most extraordinary statement ever released by an English football club, making grave allegations against Gallas.
The French defender has denied the charges, but so devalued is the credibility of big-time football that few outsiders will be inclined to place complete faith in the claims of either side. All that seems certain is that the row fits into a pattern.
Since Mourinho accepted Abramovich’s offer to take over at Chelsea two years ago, a ceaseless stream of rancour and recrimination has been allowed to overshadow the club’s achievement in winning the league title for the first time in 50 years, and then winning it again.
There can surely have been no real need for Chelsea to prolong and exacerbate their differences with an individual player. They could have kept their silence and got on with the new season. What damage, after all, could a single man inflict on such an empire? Instead, they appear to have been exposed once more as a club where vindictiveness provides a powerful source of motivation.
Both Gallas and Cole agitated for moves before the end of their contracts. Were Mourinho to defend the decision to release the statement on those grounds, however, he could perhaps be reminded of his own words after winning the European Cup two years ago, when questioned about rumoured approaches from Abramovich.
”I can’t speak about Chelsea,” he said then, ”but there are two things I can’t hide. One is that there are some clubs interested in my future. The other thing is that I have a contract with Porto. And I will have to go and see the president and the board and open my heart to them. I haven’t changed my mind. What I said some time ago is still true. The country where I would like to work is England.”
History records that Mourinho got his way, and the massive salary hike that went with it. Gallas, whose behaviour has occasionally suggested that he may be an equally sensitive character, eventually got his, too.
But, as is becoming increasingly the way in the world of football, no one was allowed to get out with dignity intact. — Â