ALWAYS SPECIAL
Like most English football fans bar a few Teletext enthusiasts, the first time I ever heard about Jose Mourinho was during the build-up to Porto’s Champions League last 16 match against Manchester United in 2004. The British football media often cast continental opposition as either dangerous bruisers or walkover Johnny Foreigners – but there was something a bit different at play here. An odd amount of press time had been dedicated to Porto’s manager, a young upstart of considerable pedigree. Listening to a football phone-in on the morning of the second leg as I walked to school, I vividly remember one caller saying, “Don’t underestimate Porto, they could really do United here” – a notion that seemed to fly in the face of empirical wisdom of the time.
By the end of that game, English football had been rocked. The image of Jose pelting it up the Old Trafford touchline, fists in the air, Prada coat flapping in the wind, was instantly transmitted around the world.
Daring to do such a thing inside Old Trafford, the Theatre Of Dreams, the Fergie Time Arena, was tantamount to sacrilege – a momentous show of disrespect in the Premier League’s Mecca. Non-United fans couldn’t get enough of it, however. They had found a glamorous, funny, sexy football iconoclast in the form of
