FOR almost a decade it was the relationship that defined football. They were the leaders of two opposing factions. They stared each other down in the most poisonous high-profile rivalry of the modern age. Their battle felt at times like a struggle for football’s soul. And yet when Pep Guardiola and Jose Mourinho will meet for the 23rd time on Sunday, there is no great sense of tumult. The heavens are not preparing to be shaken. This feels like yesterday’s war.
In part, of course, it’s the nature of the teams involved. This is Manchester City against Tottenham. It is not a game that is going to have much bearing on anything other than – possibly – the race for fourth. Even if Tottenham have proved an awkward opponent for City of late, they are a diminished force. Something had gone awry in their collective spirit even before the recent spate of injuries that has robbed them of Harry Kane and Moussa Sissoko. Such improvement as there was under Mourinho has tapered off: they’ve scored just 10 goals in his last 10 games and have kept only two clean sheets in 18 matches since he took over. Even those who believe firmly in the Mourinho project acknowledge this will not be a quick fix.
So Mourinho meets his old rival as an overwhelming underdog. This time, he can legitimately argue that his options and chances are limited. But in a sense even that is significant. There is a reason he is at Tottenham while Guardiola remains at one of the era’s superclubs, and that is that in their great culture war, Guardiola won.
is the fastest manager ever to achieve 100 Premier League wins in history. It took him only 134 matches to reach a century of victories, smashing the record previously held by Jose Mourinho. #Guardiola #ManCity #Mourinho #Klopp #Ferguson pic.twitter.com/zr65n2uwyh
— Globe Soccer Awards (@Globe_Soccer) January 25, 2020
The two were once close. Guardiola was a senior figure in the Barcelona dressing-room and Mourinho was the ambitious young assistant coach. When Barcelona won the Cup-Winners Cup in 1997, beating Paris Saint-Germain in the final in Rotterdam, it was to Guardiola that Mourinho ran in celebration as the final whistle blew. Guardiola himself pointed at Mourinho, as though acknowledging his role in the triumph.
But the two were from very different backgrounds. Mourinho came from a wealthy Portuguese family, albeit one whose status was severely reduced after the end of the Salazar dictatorship. He never quite made it as a footballer and so at Barcelona he was always an outsider – derided as ‘the Translator’. Guardiola had grown up at the club. He had played in the junior ranks, acted as a ball boy, been plucked from the reserves by Johan Cruyff. He always fitted; Mourinho didn’t.
There was always a streak of pragmatism in Mourinho. His Porto side may have pressed in the familiar Barcelona style, but there was also an expediency. That cynicism became more pronounced when Mourinho was overlooked for the Barcelona job in 2008 for Guardiola, whose experience at that stage amounted to a single year with the reserve side. But Guardiola was one of them and Mourinho was the outsider. It was as though at that point Mourinho resolved he would be the anti-Barcelona. If they wanted to dominate possession, he would win without the ball; he would expose their whole project as idealistic and sanctimonious.
And he had his triumph, with Inter in the semi-final of the 2010 Champions League. Not only did he win with 10 men and just 19 per cent of the ball, a 1-0 defeat in the second leg at the Camp Nou being enough for a 3-2 aggregate success, but he managed to provoke Barcelona into turning the sprinklers on his celebrating players, an act of ungentlemanliness that exposed their mes que un club shtick as cant. That got him the Real Madrid job and, in the end, he did topple Barca leading to Guardiola’s departure.
But the war was lost. Guardiola’s achievements over the previous three seasons had secured his legacy. Mourinho’s dogged, direct football looks stodgy now, his methods outdated, his reluctance to press high a weird cussedness that sets him apart from the general direction at the top end of the game. When Manchester United brought Mourinho in to do the same spoiling job on Guardiola he had done in Spain, there was nothing he could do. That was, in fairness, in part down to United’s inadequacies but still the sense was that the game had moved beyond him, that his style of play was archaic beside Guardiola’s clever combinations.
Sunday may produce a classic Mourinho rearguard action in the manner of his derailment of Brendan Rodgers’s title charge. Perhaps Spurs can sit in and spoil and scrap, and shake City’s rhythm. Perhaps they will take something from the game. But even if they do, it won’t alter the fact that Mourinho is playing the football of the past and that it was Guardiola’s vision that prevailed.
