golly, can this man write or what.
Just found this old James Lawton article from Christmas Eve. He wrote a piece for the Independent lambasting Mourinho, and received lots of angry e-mails accusing him of having a strong Liverpool bias, so I suppose this is his Apology of sorts. It's a fantastic read, as evidenced by the title alone.
The beauty of football is a moveable feast, not seduction by the gluttony of success
By James Lawton
Sooner or later it comes to most of us. We are obliged to leave one closet or another, generally reluctantly but perhaps with a lifting of certain pressures. Such a time has come to me in the wake of a rather fierce reaction to a piece (really it was more of a lament) about the coarsening of the style of Jose Mourinho and his all-conquering Chelsea.
It was not meant to offend the denizens of Stamford Bridge, and least of all those fans who down the years have nursed their hurts and preserved their love of a team who always represented a bit of colour and romance, if not a consistent presence among the heavyweights of English football.
Chelsea had an allure, a romance, most beautifully expressed by John Moynihan in his superb exploration of the appeal of the game, still, some 40 years on, one of the best books ever written about football and the emotion it generates.
It seemed to me that Moynihan most perfectly captured the feelings of the pure football lover. In one passage he wrote heart-rendingly of the end of an affair, in Paris, which was redeemed only by the fact that the woman he loved, who was telling him that she had found a new interest, had her back to a caf television set which was providing him with a grainy but utterly unequivocal picture of the unfolding genius of the teenaged Pele.
In his writings Moynihan did not disguise his love of Chelsea, his local team, and rivalled any man in his admiration for the likes of Tommy Lawton and Roy Bentley and Peter Osgood and Alan Hudson, but plainly his mind and his reactions were not closed to the merits of other teams and their players.
However self-serving it sounds, I have to align myself with Moynihan as I leave the closet with a confession that may surprise some of my fiercest critics this week. I do not have a team, not as such, and though this may have something to do with my upbringing as a nomadic RAF brat, I like to think there are other causes.
I like to think that, because of my own lack of some genuine tribal passion which, if part of my job was not to try to write dispassionately about the national game, I might envy in someone born to some emotional attachment to Manchester United or Liverpool or, indeed Chelsea, I see football as a moveable feast. And that if you care for a team it is not because of some accident of geography, or some sudden bloated success, but because the manager of that team has good values and invests in the wider appeal of the game as much as his own prestige and success.
In this day and age that may be asking a lot, but when I criticised Mourinho it was not because, as quite a number of e- mails suggested, I wished his success for my 'own' club and envied that of Chelsea.
That wouldn't seem likely in any passably grown man. It was because I don't like the way both Mourinho and Chelsea are going. I didn't like his conduct in the Anders Frisk and Ashley Cole affairs. I didn't like the increasingly cynical play of his pounds 24m signing Michael Essien, and I hated his lambasting of Sky Television for rerunning that player's atrocious tackle on Liverpool's Dietmar Hamann, and this was not to mention his ignoring of the beaten Arsne Wenger and subsequent nonsense concerning the latter's failure to acknowledge a Christmas card.
Mourinho has everything a football manager could dream about: a superb record, an extraordinary ability to draw the best out of players like Frank Lampard and John Terry, unlimited, unprecedented resources, and he has already displayed a high intelligence and charm. So why would you attack him? Because he has certain duties that he is neglecting in a crass way. He is elevating himself beyond the achievements of his team, and, let us be honest, it is a team that is infinitely more efficient than lovable.
It does not enchant anyone but those who see in football the chance to lord it over their rivals, who see victory, any kind of victory, as the ultimate goal. Mourinho dismisses all opposition to a point well beyond any doubt that his self-description, 'the Special One', carried something more than a generous slice of appealing self-mockery.
In criticising his style, and the increasing effect of his team's success, I like to think I was doing no more than electing myself to that company which see in football so much more than some arbitrary allocation of success and failure. If I do admire any team at this moment in football time, it is probably Liverpool, and the reason for that is because of the example being set by their manager, Rafael Benitez.
It is not unconditional support; it is the assessment that of all the leading managers operating today the Spaniard has least cause to look in the mirror and wonder if he is doing his best for the game that has rewarded him and his family so lavishly.
Benitez is building a highly competitive team on nothing like the resources of his predecessor, Grard Houllier. He has won the Champions' League, the Uefa Cup and the Spanish League, and in a season and a half he has returned Liverpool to the status of authentic members of the lite in the English game. He has done it without bombast, without traducing referees, without giving himself the airs of anyone but a working football man. Yes, I glory in that, but it doesn't mean that Liverpool is 'my' club. It means merely that currently they lay a claim on my admiration.
Mourinho did that when he won the Champions' League so brilliantly for ill-considered Porto in Gelsenkerchen two years ago. He persuaded me to wager a good dinner and decent wine with an esteemed colleague that he would win the Premiership at his first attempt. Back then, I didn't calculate the degree of indigestion that would come with his reaction to his success. The postprandial feeling has to be that neither he nor his team have come on in the way any open-minded football devotee would have hoped.
The beauty of football is a moveable feast, not seduction by the gluttony of success
By James Lawton
Sooner or later it comes to most of us. We are obliged to leave one closet or another, generally reluctantly but perhaps with a lifting of certain pressures. Such a time has come to me in the wake of a rather fierce reaction to a piece (really it was more of a lament) about the coarsening of the style of Jose Mourinho and his all-conquering Chelsea.
It was not meant to offend the denizens of Stamford Bridge, and least of all those fans who down the years have nursed their hurts and preserved their love of a team who always represented a bit of colour and romance, if not a consistent presence among the heavyweights of English football.
Chelsea had an allure, a romance, most beautifully expressed by John Moynihan in his superb exploration of the appeal of the game, still, some 40 years on, one of the best books ever written about football and the emotion it generates.
It seemed to me that Moynihan most perfectly captured the feelings of the pure football lover. In one passage he wrote heart-rendingly of the end of an affair, in Paris, which was redeemed only by the fact that the woman he loved, who was telling him that she had found a new interest, had her back to a caf television set which was providing him with a grainy but utterly unequivocal picture of the unfolding genius of the teenaged Pele.
In his writings Moynihan did not disguise his love of Chelsea, his local team, and rivalled any man in his admiration for the likes of Tommy Lawton and Roy Bentley and Peter Osgood and Alan Hudson, but plainly his mind and his reactions were not closed to the merits of other teams and their players.
However self-serving it sounds, I have to align myself with Moynihan as I leave the closet with a confession that may surprise some of my fiercest critics this week. I do not have a team, not as such, and though this may have something to do with my upbringing as a nomadic RAF brat, I like to think there are other causes.
I like to think that, because of my own lack of some genuine tribal passion which, if part of my job was not to try to write dispassionately about the national game, I might envy in someone born to some emotional attachment to Manchester United or Liverpool or, indeed Chelsea, I see football as a moveable feast. And that if you care for a team it is not because of some accident of geography, or some sudden bloated success, but because the manager of that team has good values and invests in the wider appeal of the game as much as his own prestige and success.
In this day and age that may be asking a lot, but when I criticised Mourinho it was not because, as quite a number of e- mails suggested, I wished his success for my 'own' club and envied that of Chelsea.
That wouldn't seem likely in any passably grown man. It was because I don't like the way both Mourinho and Chelsea are going. I didn't like his conduct in the Anders Frisk and Ashley Cole affairs. I didn't like the increasingly cynical play of his pounds 24m signing Michael Essien, and I hated his lambasting of Sky Television for rerunning that player's atrocious tackle on Liverpool's Dietmar Hamann, and this was not to mention his ignoring of the beaten Arsne Wenger and subsequent nonsense concerning the latter's failure to acknowledge a Christmas card.
Mourinho has everything a football manager could dream about: a superb record, an extraordinary ability to draw the best out of players like Frank Lampard and John Terry, unlimited, unprecedented resources, and he has already displayed a high intelligence and charm. So why would you attack him? Because he has certain duties that he is neglecting in a crass way. He is elevating himself beyond the achievements of his team, and, let us be honest, it is a team that is infinitely more efficient than lovable.
It does not enchant anyone but those who see in football the chance to lord it over their rivals, who see victory, any kind of victory, as the ultimate goal. Mourinho dismisses all opposition to a point well beyond any doubt that his self-description, 'the Special One', carried something more than a generous slice of appealing self-mockery.
In criticising his style, and the increasing effect of his team's success, I like to think I was doing no more than electing myself to that company which see in football so much more than some arbitrary allocation of success and failure. If I do admire any team at this moment in football time, it is probably Liverpool, and the reason for that is because of the example being set by their manager, Rafael Benitez.
It is not unconditional support; it is the assessment that of all the leading managers operating today the Spaniard has least cause to look in the mirror and wonder if he is doing his best for the game that has rewarded him and his family so lavishly.
Benitez is building a highly competitive team on nothing like the resources of his predecessor, Grard Houllier. He has won the Champions' League, the Uefa Cup and the Spanish League, and in a season and a half he has returned Liverpool to the status of authentic members of the lite in the English game. He has done it without bombast, without traducing referees, without giving himself the airs of anyone but a working football man. Yes, I glory in that, but it doesn't mean that Liverpool is 'my' club. It means merely that currently they lay a claim on my admiration.
Mourinho did that when he won the Champions' League so brilliantly for ill-considered Porto in Gelsenkerchen two years ago. He persuaded me to wager a good dinner and decent wine with an esteemed colleague that he would win the Premiership at his first attempt. Back then, I didn't calculate the degree of indigestion that would come with his reaction to his success. The postprandial feeling has to be that neither he nor his team have come on in the way any open-minded football devotee would have hoped.