Why Jose Mourinho Is the Harold Pinter of Football

Illustration by Craig "Questions" Scott

It was Bobby Charlton who first called Old Trafford "The Theatre Of Dreams". In the years after its coinage in 1978, that nice little soundbite would not only end up emblazoned across the stadium itself, but also become the platonic ideal for all British football grounds to aspire to.

And it's not tough to see why. It's a quote that sums up everything we've come to love about football-as-spectacle, with its partisan "my club shits on yours" mindset, its inherent narcissism and pomposity, the way it nods to the reality of a modern game in which all the lead men are either gladiators or ballet dancers and someone in the crowd is always crying. Every club that has built a new stadium since 1978 has yearned for its own "Theatre Of Dreams", even if most have woken up with a sore head and no money near an out-of-town Toys R Us.

Not all football stadiums can be Carnegie Hall or the Coliseum. Even Bobby's dream theatre has fallen into disrepair of late, now more a dilapidated end-of-pier casino filled with angry day-trippers and tourists, tiring of David Moyes' fumbled attempts to pull rabbits from hats, while Rooney and RVP bicker like divorcing Krankies. Football might well be a kind of theatre, but not all theatre is Starlight Express or Jude Law doing Henry V. Sometimes it's nasty, seedy or just plain difficult.

Thankfully, Alex Ferguson's curtain call hasn't sapped any drama from the top of the Premier League, merely set the scene for a desperate power struggle. The emerging new rivalry between the division's current "big three" of Jose Mourinho, Manuel Pellegrini and pantomime-pony-turned-War-Horse Arsene Wenger is an enthralling spectacle of competing ideologies and interests.

As you may have noticed, two of those teams played each other on Monday night. Man City went into the game as favourites – Mourinho and Chelsea may have beaten them earlier in the season, but City have been playing like a House Robot recently. They'd scored an astonishing 68 goals (it's February, btw) and won every home league game they'd played so far. Negredo and Aguero have been tormenting defences like piss-taking matadors, Yaya Toure has been bursting through entire teams like an alien through John Hurt's chest and, somehow, they've turned Dean Gaffney into probably the best "pure" winger in the world right now.

Chelsea, meanwhile, have been a Mourinho team. At this stage, we don't really have to go into what that means. Tricky, lucky, dogged, an absolute fucker to break down. They may have dropped some stupid points here and there, leaving them "languishing" in third. But in relative terms, this is still a young and raw Mourinho team. Nemanja Matic might look like the kind of man who carries out orders for warlords, but as yet he's not at the stage where he looks as much like a baby-eater as Esteban Cambiasso.

Needless to say, it was Chelsea who won, because Mourinho doesn't lose games like this very often. He's firmly back on the wind-up now, and with the benefit of hindsight it can seem like he basically had Pellegrini beat before it kicked off. He got the angry Scottish masseur to do the pre-match speech, and then basically told his team to punish City every time they had the audacity to try to score one of their beloved goals. Chelsea may have only registered one but the fact it was Branislav Ivanovic – Mourinho's "Adam", a player seemingly created in the image of the Special One himself – made it a perfect victory. Seriously, there is no more Mourinho player than Ivanovic.

Generally, the response was that Chelsea deserved to win. Mourinho is clearly used to the "park the bus" flak by now anyway, after years of having his actually-very-exciting Real Madrid team dismissed as thugs compared to football's moral Catalan compass. But why is Negredo handsome and Ivanovic ugly? Why is Busquets a warrior and Pepe a thug? Surely beauty is in the eye of the beholder? Football is a chaotic, hopelessly subjective game. It shouldn't be tied to notions of objective beauty.

Football can be very shallow about what it deems ugly. Sure, sometimes a player like Carrick sneaks their way into critical appraisal, but you have to be doing unglamorous work at a glamorous club to get that. If he played for Stoke, no one would give a shit. Carrick is praised for the amount of interceptions he makes, yet the countless ones that Geoff Cameron makes for Stoke are much more valuable to his side. Apparently it's better to be a square peg in a round hole at a top team than to fit in perfectly at one squabbling away in mid-table. And even then, Cameron will never tot up quite the same level of fanfare and interest as, say, Bryan Ruiz.

It's when you combine players who do mundane (but important) work in average teams that you reach the nadir of football's appreciation. There is precious little attention paid to players like Sylvain Distin or Kevin Nolan. Sure, they're not great – without Andy Carroll to knock balls down out of the sky for him, Nolan is rarely even good – but does that necessarily mean they're any less interesting to watch? At times, watching Jonjo Shelvey struggle with his own propensity for idiocy this season has been as compelling as Southcliffe. But football is a multiplex cinema, and everyone wants to see the film with the most explosions. Nobody wants to watch the oil turn the colour of a dirty bruise in Tony Pulis' kitchen sink, or overhear Mourinho quietly quarrelling with his missus in a coffee shop. They want Pellegrini's John Woo take on football.

Maybe such thinking is just a little bit basic? Even among football fans who steal their ideas from podcasts rather than phone-ins there remains this lingering notion that crash-bang-wallop-Aguero-scores-again football is the only way it can be played. Hearing this from people who rave about the subtleties in The Wire and Oneohtrix Point Never is confusing. This year, Blizzard readers may have chosen Bayer Leverkusen as their FIFA online team, but that's only because it's still raining goals galore out in Germany. It's like those people who claim they like foreign films and can only offer up Old Boy as an example, because it's got "lots of killing" in it. Maybe we need to transfer a bit more of our developed cultural tastes into our football tastes.

So, for all his flamboyance and goal explosions, in theatrical terms, perhaps Pellegrini is actually football's Andrew Lloyd Webber? A man whose teams make a lot of noise, but lack the soul and depth to go down in history? And maybe Jose, for his dourness and pretence, is more akin to Samuel Beckett or Harold Pinter – a man whose works don't really play to the tourists, but whose teams often come to define eras, and tell us much more about the dark corners of the sporting mind than a year's worth of "Goal Of The Month" compilations.

Then there's Wenger, the super-ambitious arts director of a North London community college, romantically trying to stage Brecht productions with a cast of local schoolkids and a celebrity pisshead with a CSO. I know I haven't talked about Arsenal much but for all their flaws, maybe they're finally getting that balance of art and football right this season. Fuck, maybe they'll even win it.

Or maybe they won't. Because Jose will. And when he does, Sir Bobby will still be sat there frowning in the gods at Old Trafford, sweating in his fur trapper hat, wondering if Mourinho was the man United needed to wake them from their nightmare all along.

Follow Clive on Twitter: @thugclive

Previously – Trying to Understand Why Transfer Deadline Day Exists