JFairfax posted:

lol:

Mourinho left to make his fortune and succeeded, but when he wanted to return they denied him. He was a little bit different. He wasn’t a player but a translator-turned-coach. He wasn’t one of them. He didn’t think like them. He didn’t instantly revere Rinus Michels. He looked at the game and asked not how to win while playing well, but simply how to win. He had a pragmatic edge that meant he never quite fitted in. He came, in 2008, replete with honours, wanting to be coach and they preferred one of their own, whose coaching experience consisted of one season with the reserve team. He became the outcast, the rebel, the fallen angel. He began to define himself in opposition to Barcelona and thus to the prevailing footballing ethos of the age, determining, like Satan in Paradise Lost, that “glory never shall his wrath or might extort from me.” He would not play by their rules; he do things his way in self-conscious opposition and prove that he was right. He vowed, like Milton’s Satan “to wage by force of guile eternal war, irreconcilable to our grand Foe.”