If you have ever seen someone in the middle of a crisis, Jose Mourinho’s post-game interview after his Chelsea side lost 3-1 to Southampton will at be once inspirational, unbelievable, and familiar.
Chelsea were the 14/15 Premier League Champions. Now they are sitting just four places above dead last. His team has no identity; it is in full crisis mode, and so is Jose Mourinho. Losing to Southampton made that crisis unignorable, and forced Jose Mourinho to finally address it after the game.
Talking to someone who is in a crisis is usually like balancing a conversation on a knife’s edge; the slightest word here or expression there can send them falling into despair. But this is Jose Mourinho we are talking about, a master of mind games; he never really lets the cracks show. Instead he hides them behind arrogance and delusion.
That is the truly fascinating thing about this interview: you can’t tell if he has finally lost it, or if he is still playing us all.
If you are a Chelsea fan there is some inspiration to be found in this interview. He asks that his team stand up, dust itself off, and take responsibility for its actions. He asks that they play without fear. He calls out his team on national television, and not only manages to try to inspire them, but he also deflects attention away from the fact that he just called them out by calling out the referees in the most ridiculous way possible.
“The referees are afraid to give decisions for Chelsea. The result 1-1, [there] is a huge penalty, and once more we don’t get.”
“And I repeat — if the FA wants to punish me they can punish me. They don’t punish other managers, they punish me. It’s not a problem for me, but I want to repeat because I think my players deserve it. Chelsea fans deserve it.”
“I want to say it again: referees are afraid to give decisions for Chelsea.”
“We are always punished.”
Let’s just get one thing clear, if anyone should have gotten a penalty call it was Southampton; they should have gotten two in the first half, but they got none. Here is the most blatant:
To suggest that Chelsea were screwed over because the referees missed penalty calls of all things is absolutely ridiculous, so ridiculous that Mourinho might have done it on purpose. He jumped in front of a bullet that he himself shot, and in doing so deflected all the attention away from his team and towards himself. That’s either the most brilliant or most bat s*** crazy thing any manager has done all year. We’ll have to see how it plays out.
Still, the fact that he has had to resort to such ridiculous tactics shows that the world is indeed falling apart around him. Jose Mourinho is in full crisis mode. It’s an amazing case study on what happens when an uncompromising ego comes face to face with their own insufferable failure…
…sorry, for those of us (including me) that haven’t studied psychology, this is what I mean: Jose Mourinho never, ever admits he’s wrong, and now that he’s been forced to do so…well, it’s like watching a glorious, egomaniacal train wreck.
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