UK Edition
When it came to the severity of the insult, to the relentlessness of the hostility, Jose Mourinho always had an appetite that went beyond those like Arsene Wenger and Rafael Benitez whom he targeted, but this weekend he may finally have found someone who shares his commitment to the feud.
The last word in 48 hours of what is surely the modern game’s quickest escalation in mutual managerial contempt fell to Antonio Conte, identifying Mourinho as a “little man” and “a fake” and showing a general willingness to take on his predecessor at Chelsea for as long as it takes and as often as necessary.
Mourinho’s denunciation of Conte on Friday night with his match-fixing reference was a kind of Mourinho reflex action - in part planned but chiefly instinctive - yet it has not had the usual effect of shocking its target into submission, as has so often been the case in the past. Instead, Conte has come back for more and now Mourinho finds himself in a super-feud different to those in which he usually prevails.
Friday’s diversion into Conte’s past conviction by the Italian football association (FIGC) for failing to report match-fixing was a classic Mourinho tactic. It was his Pavlovian response, his reluctant but unerring instinct to annihilate the opposition in any argument, after a fairly comprehensive insult from Conte over Mourinho’s “senile dementia” that the latter first excused as a misunderstanding and then punished.
Over the course of his rise to prominence in the 21st century, Mourinho has made the managerial rivalry much more bitter, more personal, more unpleasant, than ever before and so with grim symmetry the box office appeal of the Premier League has benefitted.
It lies at the heart of the Mourinho story, the former PE teacher who built a career from hard graft and rapid absorption of information; a nobody at 35, a world star at 41; the man who recalls his own father being sacked as a manager on Christmas Day. He will defend the reputation he has built at all costs and if it is the case that events escalate - that words get harder and allegations nastier - then that just happens to be an arms race he has decided he cannot afford to lose.
For almost a decade he and Sir Alex Ferguson managed to dance around one another in that managerial bromance that, for all its courtesies, just never felt right. The older man wary of Mourinho’s bite; Mourinho cautious of Ferguson’s immense appetite for bearing grudges. Now Conte has changed the picture, a Premier League title-winner himself, a much more successful former player than either Wenger or Benitez, and with that look in his eye that would make anyone think twice.
Where does it leave Mourinho? It seems impossible that he will change and that this mutual contempt will, at the very least, endure for the rest of both men’s careers, in the Premier League and beyond. Neither will wish to give an inch and the notion of a peace deal brokered by the League Managers’ Association would be a dreadful shame now that we finally know what these two really think of one another.
That he brought match-fixing, and its historical connection with Conte, onto the agenda fell somewhere between the two classic Mourinho responses. He left it until right at the end of a long monologue that seemed designed to put out the fire between the two men, before, at the last moment, changing his mind, referring to match-fixing and then refusing to distance the remark from Conte.
There are times when he is unmistakeably pre-meditated, such as the comments before the derby with Manchester City when Mourinho threw everything at Pep Guardiola, from his ribbon supporting the Catalan independence referendum to allegations of diving and tactical fouls. On Friday night he was vague enough about Conte and the match-fixing allegations to suggest that he knew the severity of what he was doing and recognised that things could easily get out of hand.
As with all Mourinho attacks, there is unquestionably a kernel of truth to what he is saying. Conte was suspended by the Commissione Disciplinare della FIGC (the disciplinary commission of the Italian football association) for 10 months, later reduced to four months on appeal for failing to report match-fixing in two games while he was in charge of Siena. As a consequence, in his next job as manager of Juventus, he missed 15 Serie A games and six in the Champions League.
Then, in May 2016, he was cleared of all charges against him in the Italian courts, where prosecutors were pushing for a six-month suspended jail sentence - by which time he was manager of Italy who were going into Euro 2016 that summer. The difference between being found guilty by a sporting body, but acquitted in the courts, is not impossible for the English game to comprehend, much the same having happened to John Terry over his use of racist language towards Anton Ferdinand in 2012.
On Friday, Mourinho was demonstrating to another rival that there is no place he is unprepared to go in order to undermine and damage anyone who challenges him as publically as Conte dared to do. Yet Conte did not go simply go away. His responses after the Norwich City FA Cup tie were measured, delivered with a smile and quite clearly rehearsed, and his point about Mourinho’s rather hollow support of Claudio Ranieri post-Leicester sacking rang very true.
Watching him, Mourinho will know that there is no option but to go on with the feud, even if at some point – as has been the case at times with Wenger – that both pretend the grudge is over. This one is real and although Conte may not last long at Chelsea, he will be in football for a long time yet.
In Antonio Conte, Jose Mourinho may finally have found someone who shares his appetite for a feud