It featured a man running across a football pitch, hand aloft, finger pointed, cheeks puffed out. Not unusual to see a celebratory figure in the sports section, perhaps. Except this one was not in playing kit. Jose Mourinho was wearing a suit, tie and handsome suede Chelsea boots.
After their team's heroic success in overcoming Barcelona to reach the Champions League final, not a single Inter Milan player was regarded as significant enough to illustrate it. Not Estaban Cambiasso, who gave a masterclass in defensive midfield play, not Lucio, surely the best centre-back in the world, not even Julio Cesar, whose elastic-limbed save from Lionel Messi's first-half shot resembled an out-take from The Incredibles.
No, everything was about the man in charge. This was characterised as a triumph entirely forged in the technical area: a victory of tactics over skill, of planning over improvisation, of preparation over fantasy. It was the white board win. As one headline pithily put it, this was "the night of Jose Mourinho".
And so the cult of the manager reaches its zenith. Can anyone remember a team boss being as celebrated in victory? Jock Stein, Bill Shankly, Sir Matt Busby – they all received plaudits by the bucketload for sure, but never were they credited quite so unanimously as the sole reason for their side's success.
Even in these times when coaching is considered the highest amalgam of science and art, Arsène Wenger, Marcello Lippi and Guus Hiddink are only reckoned as good as the ammunition at their disposal. Not even Brian Clough was granted, as Mourinho was on Wednesday night, the ultimate accolade: it was he who won the match without kicking a ball.
This is not to say that his input was unimportant. The strategy he employed was perfect. He organised his team into defensive lines to smother the incursions of Messi, not spending too much time worrying about Zlatan Imbrahimovic, who could be left alone to pursue his single-handed campaign to be recognised as the most overrated footballer on the planet.
More to the point, Mourinho has been responsible for instilling a togetherness in his squad that enabled the tactics to work to perfection. In their steely, white-shirted resistance, they resembled England's rugby team playing New Zealand in that warm-up Test before the 2003 World Cup.
Reduced to 14 men, Clive Woodward's team withstood a battering from the most celebrated attacking force in the game. And, just like in Barcelona, no amount of Kiwi bleating about possession statistics, or killing the game, or ugliness smothering beauty could alter the fact that they emerged victorious.
"The style Inter play is the blood style not the skin style," Mourinho said after the game. "When the moment of leave everything on the pitch comes, we don't leave the skin, we leave the blood."
His introduction of such Grand Guignol imagery was typical of the man. It might seem like praise for his players, but really its hyperbolic swagger – and his use of plural pronoun – ensured it was really about him: this is a team prepared to die for him. Which is always his trick. Nobody plays the modern football media better, nobody, not even Sir Alex Ferguson, is as adept at drawing the focus on to himself, thus allowing his players to relax away from attention.
Even those no longer in the dressing room feel the benefit of such selfless monopoly of the limelight. Now employed as an ambassador by Inter, Luis Figo, a man regarded in Catalonia as beneath contempt for switching from Barça to Real Madrid, said he had not felt as relaxed walking into the Nou Camp in years. It was, he said, because he knew the locals hated Mourinho even more than him.
Yet there is evidence that the man himself suffers the occasional twinge from the image he has constructed. At Inter, he developed a siege mentality in the squad by painting himself as the loathed outsider, despised by the Italian coaching establishment. It worked brilliantly on the pitch. But clearly there was a cost to his own ego.
The way he talks about his standing in Italy suggests regret that he is not more admired in the land of the coach. In the end, what he loves most is to be loved. Which is why he likes England so much: we are slaves to his rhythm.
Thus wearied by Italy, he is said to be looking for a new pastures. And for many Jose watchers, next month's Champions League final at the Bernabeu is set up as a handy audition. He has already endeared himself to Madrid loyalists by winning in Barça with a team dressed in white. A victory over Bayern on their ground would surely convince Madrid's hierarchy, bruised by yet another season of European underachievement, that he is the man they need.
But it won't be a simple appointment for either party. Managing Real Madrid would prove the definitive challenge for the Mourinho way. This has never been a club in sway to the cult of the manager. Coaches there – even those as elevated as Fabio Capello – come well down the order of priorities, below superstar players, prima donna presidents and the most demanding fans on earth.
To go there and take control as he has everywhere else in his career would signal the most significant shift in football power even he has engineered. For Mourinho to become the story at Madrid would be the final testament to his genius.
Source: The Telegraph