Patrick Barclay: Authorities must punish puerile Jose Mourinho if Chelsea boss persists with 'weak and naive' jibe

Puerile: Football authorities should not let Jose Mourinho escape punishment
(Clive Rose/Getty Images)
Patrick Barclay22 October 2015

Jose Mourinho was lucky to get into top-level coaching. He owed it to the good judgment of Sir Bobby Robson, who noticed that the young Portuguese, who had been hired to help him in another way, could analyse a match like few others.

Mourinho could do it in English, too, having learned the language at school and university; hence Sporting Lisbon made him Robson’s interpreter. He was to move with Robson to Porto and then Barcelona, developing as a coach while employing his off-the-field skills.

That ended in 1998 when Robson, kicked upstairs by Barcelona, passed him on to Louis van Gaal. But six years later Mourinho was in the Chelsea job and, of the 12 seasons since, he has spent all or part of seven living and working in England. So would he please stop trying to insult our intelligence.

Apparently Mourinho feels his latest FA punishment — a £50,000 fine and suspended ban for saying referee Bobby Madley was “afraid” to give Chelsea a penalty — was especially unfair because English was his third language and he did not always understand its nuances.

What breathtaking tripe! A decade ago, Mourinho was disarming us with a semantic dexterity no indigenous manager could match and only on Tuesday, in a Daily Mail interview, he came up with a phrase – “the culture of the vulture” — of which Larkin or Auden would have been proud.

In plainer terms: Mourinho isn’t half asking for it — even though I can understand his frustration that the FA failed to throw the book at Arsene Wenger for pushing him last season. Now he plans to keep using the Wenger words “weak” and “naive”.

He used them in Kiev and, while any punishment for that would appear a Uefa matter, authority generally must not let puerile behaviour prevail.

Player Ratings: Dynamo Kiev vs Chelsea

1/11

Mourinho’s record defines him as an all-time great. His English enables him to be a witty man.

Why can’t he just settle for that enviable double?

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