The Mourinho vendetta

Mourinho

The shock waves are still reverberating around the world that Jose Mourinho, enigmatic football coach, is now the manager of Tottenham Hotspur playing presently in the English Premier League.

However, don’t expect the waves to ever dissipate.

Based on Mourinho’s performance, they’ll keep reverberating. If he succeeds, they will, and if he fails, they will as well.

And in the light of his acceptance of managing Tottenham, it has emerged that he once declared he’ll never take the Tottenham head coach job.

So why did he eat his words and take it?

The most tenable explanation has to be that he has it in for his immediate past employer, Manchester United, and he wants to get back at them.

When he was sacked by United in December 2018 due to a poor return of results and they improved immediately under his successor, Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, he kept his peace because the results vindicated United.

But recent results that have been extremely poor as well under Solskjaer have seen Mourinho finally able to aim digs at him and United thereby and inadvertently revealing his mindset that he has a grudge against United, just like his own predecessor, the enigmatic Loius van Gaal who was also sacked after two seasons and who believed he was betrayed and has been alleged to have said he wouldn’t mind another stint in England coaching just to strike back at United.

So this must be Mourinho’s motivation too for taking the Tottenham job and the reason for even his alleged desire to take the Arsenal job which was then still Unai Emery’s until he was sacked too and replaced in the interim by Freddie Ljungberg.

But can Mourinho’s United vendetta help him in the Tottenham job or mitigate against him?

A part of that question will be answered tonight when he takes Tottenham to Old Trafford and will definitely charge his men to get a very convincing and humiliating result against a United side that’s extremely vulnerable and seemingly lacking direction.

Mind you, his first three Tottenham games haven’t been really impressive as he conceded two goals in each match and conceded those two goals in his two EPL matches so far after having three-goal leads.

So while his vendetta should really be a motivating factor to enable him take Tottenham to the heights they only dream of, only time will tell if it will indeed help him take them to that land of glory that will make United bite their fingers in regret, or it will make him blind that just being above United would be satisfactory for him, but certainly not for Tottenham.