Mourinho for Madrid
The interesting nature of this assignment is that you get to deal with interesting people, you travel to interesting places and you read interesting things. Why is it so? Because futbol, like life is filled with the crazy people.
Like reading Marca. Right now Manuel Pellegrini is in a special place, untouchable to a point as Madrid have been having their way with opponents, but whether it’s an editorial directive at the paper, or a personality clash with the coach, there is a definite campaign to discredit, devalue or dishonor Pellegrini: they want him fired.
According to them there were five other coaches that were available, in all sorts of levels of availability I might add, that could have come to the blancos, but didn’t. The horror. The outrage, and unbelievably, Real Madrid were forced to settle for the hound-dog engineer from the sticks. He was dull, dour, with little personality, and didn’t play the media games that some of his contemporaries did. He lost to Barcelona at the Camp Nou, Sevilla at the Sanchez-Pizjuan and remarkably a third division derby match to nearby Alcorcon: booting them out of the Copa del Rey. A fire-able offense in this year of the megalacticos, but honestly in the grand scheme of things the King’s Cup means nothing economically.
Imagine this nightmare scenario however: down 0-1 to Lyon in the Champions League, Lisandro Lopez sneaks one past St. Iker between the sticks and the visitors park the bus for 120 minutes squeaking into the next stage of the Champions League and Real Madrid are out. Florentino Perez has done it before. Hell, he fired Vicente del Bosque for winning the Champions League, so I wouldn’t put it past him. A caretaker manager comes in for the rest of the season, they buy Villa or Cesc or a dozen other supergalacticos, but who do they bring in to run the show?
It won’t be Rafa. Rafa’s football is, according to Valdano, like “watching shit on a stick.” His clubs are tactically astute, machine-like in their approach, and like Capello’s Real Madrid, that won two leagues under him and fired him after both terms of service, dull as dishwater. It’s a naive point of view some say, to require your team to entertain as well as win, but a club’s strength is in its history and its ideals. Real Madrid teams play a certain way: they dictate, they dominate and they attack.
It’s quite ironic then that the perfect coach for that style is sitting on the bench at the Camp Nou: Pep Guardiola, steeped in the traditions of their bitterest rival. Do El Real have the guts to hire a former player of theirs to take the reigns, like a Michel at Getafe who failed miserably at Real Madrid Castilla or another in ex-Getafe coach Michael Laudrup who played for both Spanish giants? They both might understand the culture, the public’s need for pretty football, but are bound by the one truism that binds all coaches. Results are all that matter, and they can get you fired, so most just follow the herd: park the bus, play 7 men behind the ball, hit the opponent on the counter, and win one nil.
There are a few ideologues like Wenger still left, men like Cesar Luis Menotti who won the 1978 World Cup with Argentina and his countrymen Jose Pekerman and Jorge Valdano. A few brits like Owen Coyle and Tony Mowbray fit the picture, but is there someone who can stand the heat of expectation at Madrid and still take the philosophical high-road? I’m not sure you can. I’m not sure even Mourinho could.
