Say what you like about Jose Mourinho, but he certainly gave the Premier League a bit of much needed colour. Apart from anything else, he's the only manager I can think of that has managed to get a rise out of the otherwise preternaturally calm and composed Arsene Wenger. For that alone, we should surely salute him.
I don't know quite what Roman Abramovich thought he was doing by hounding out the best decision he ever made, but I imagine it's something he can find out at his leisure as Avram Grant puts Andriy Shevchenko and Michael Ballack straight into the side....
I don't imagine Jose will be out of work for very long, but in them meantime, here's a selection of some of the quotes (brazenly stolen from Wikipedia) that made us love him in the first place.
"Please don't call me arrogant, but I'm European champion and I think I'm a special one."
"There are only two ways for me to leave Chelsea. One way is in June 2010 when I finish my contract and if the club doesn't give me a new one. It is the end of my contract and I am out. The second way is for Chelsea to sack me. The way of the manager leaving the club by deciding to walk away, no chance! I will never do this to Chelsea supporters."
"We have top players and, sorry if I'm arrogant, we have a top manager."
"If I wanted to have an easy job...I would have stayed at Porto - beautiful blue chair, the UEFA Champions League trophy, God, and after God, me."
"If he helped me out in training we would be bottom of the league and if I had to work in his world of big business, we would be bankrupt." - on Chelsea F.C. owner Roman Abramovich (I guess now we'll see, eh?)
"I think he is one of these people who is a voyeur. He likes to watch other people. There are some guys who, when they are at home, have a big telescope to see what happens in other families. He speaks, speaks, speaks about Chelsea." - on Arsène Wenger
"Look, we're not entertaining? I don't care; we win."
"Young players are a little bit like melons. Only when you open and taste the melon are you 100 percent sure that the melon is good.Sometimes you have beautiful melons but they don't taste very good and some other melons are a bit ugly and when you open them, the taste is fantastic."
"Omelette, eggs. No eggs, no omelettes. It depends on the quality of the eggs. In the supermarket you have eggs, class one, class two, class three. Some are more expensive than others, and some give you better omelettes. When the class one eggs are in Waitrose and you cannot go there, you have a problem"
Come back soon Jose. We'll miss you.
4 comments:
I think Alan Pardew also managed to get on Arsene Wenger's mammaries quite spectacularly.
http://footblog.typepad.com/footblog/2006/11/wenger_pardew_f.html
I just like the fact you've used a picture of him looking pissed off in *our* dugout. Is this from when we knocked them out of the League Cup the other season? ;)
Frankly I'm curious for his reasons. After the "I would never walk out" comments and the fact that he walked instead of being fired...
this has been coming for a while, hasn't it? I nearly put some money down on him leaving before the end of the season... but of course never did.
he clearly wasn't happy with having Ballack and Shevchenko foisted on him, and Abramovich clearly wasn't happy with him. It was going to end in tears, and because the Russian owns the club, the best manager they have ever had has to walk out. Ridiculous. Avram Grant? Do me a favour. Remember that Ranieri had the money and never achieved anywhere near what Mourinho did.
I'm a neutral (as far as the Premier League goes, anyway) and I'll definitely miss him.
ST
...and on reflection, Abramovich probably still thinks the best decision he ever made was the bribes he put in that enabled him to purchase half of the natural resources in the former Soviet Union for buttons. Mourinho was up there in the top five though, I'm sure.
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