For Jose Mourinho to prove he is not an anachronism in the modern game, he’ll have to turn back the clock at Tottenham

Mourinho Pochettino

He always could coin a phrase, could Jose Mourinho. Long before he would have contemplated taking the Tottenham job, his frustrations about their tactics became part of the footballing lexicon. Jacques Santini’s Spurs bored his way to a stalemate at Stamford Bridge in 2004. “Tottenham might as well have put the team bus in front of their goal,” he said.

When Mourinho added “parking the bus” to the game’s vocabulary, he was the self-styled “Special One”. Not any more. Part of the intrigue generated by Tottenham’s decision to replace Mauricio Pochettino with Mourinho is that he seems the opposite of everything they have represented in recent years. Part of it is simply whether Mourinho can reverse the narrative of his career. He can tout second place in 2018 with Manchester United as one of his greatest feats and reference winning the League Cup and the Europa League in 2017, but the alternative perspective is that his time at Old Trafford was his first genuine failure since Benfica.

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Richard Jolly

Richard Jolly also writes for the National, the Guardian, the Observer, the Straits Times, the Independent, Sporting Life, Football 365 and the Blizzard. He has written for the FourFourTwo website since 2018 and for the magazine in the 1990s and the 2020s, but not in between. He has covered 1500+ games and remembers a disturbing number of the 0-0 draws.