When he met the media on Friday in Manchester, Pep Guardiola attempted to explain the fascination with managers of football clubs. The fascination will increase next season as Manchester becomes, if not the centre of the football universe as some suggest, the centre of the universe for those wondering if Pep and Jose Mourinho might bump into each other in the same Chinese restaurant.
“We speak a lot so that’s why people think we have all the solutions,” Pep explained, adding that managers don’t have all the solutions, a point of view which is reasonable, which doesn’t make it any less likely to be ignored.
Pep wanted to explain that it so much depended on the players, that there was only so much a manager could do and most of what a manager could do wouldn’t take place in the press conference.
Of course, this makes perfect sense, but not many people will be listening now. When the European Championships are done on Sunday, there will be a notional break, but as Manchester United have a pre-season game against Wigan next Saturday, the break won’t even be notional.
By then, we can start the month-long build up to the opening weekend of the season, a build-up which will depend on press conferences for much of its direction, when it is not relying on the anticipation of a chance meeting between Mourinho and Guardiola.
On Friday, Pep took some of the tension out of it, making the eventual encounter seem less like a scene from Heat and more like a slow-moving drama set in a retirement village in rural Wales.
“I think it will happen naturally,” Pep said. “One day I will arrive at a restaurant and he will be there. It will be ‘Hi, how are you?’ He will say ‘Hi’ as well.”
For some, even this will not dull their excitement. Last week, Sky Sports spent an hour building up to Mourinho’s first press conference as Manchester United which it is easy to argue is excessive, even there is a lot to be learned from observing Mourinho on these days.
On Tuesday, he appeared a bit underwhelmed, looking a little miserable, like a man who has spent some time telling people he was embarking on the “holiday of a lifetime” only to discover that the hotel he has booked overlooks an eight-lane motorway while the jacuzzi he thought was getting is actually a toilet in his bedroom.
He could have been taking us all for a ride. There are those who observe Mourinho in a press conference and still believe he is manipulating the media with an illusionist’s knack for diversion. So they watch him talk about the 783 players he has given debuts to and think he has forced the press to spend their time talking about Lenny Pidgeley when they would instead have focused on something Mourinho didn’t want them to talk about.
This is to imagine Mourinho hasn’t changed in the twelve years since he became Chelsea’s manager when in those years has become acutely aware of the failings of humans and even more aware of their tendency to fail him.
At the beginning of last season when Mourinho began his ill-advised dispute with Eva Carneiro, there were plenty of people remarking wisely that this was all a distraction by Jose, he was just diverting attention away from a draw against Swansea City.
This theory didn’t last long. Once it became clear that Chelsea were embarking on a spectacular implosion and that Mourinho meant everything he said in press conferences then it became harder to view it as a carefully spun distraction.
Cunning by Mourinho: get Chelsea to play badly to deflect attention from the Eva Carneiro issue
— Dion Fanning (@dionfanning) August 16, 2015
This may be one of the distinctions between Pep and Mourinho. Guardiola notably remarked that in press conferences Mourinho “is the fucking boss, the fucking master”.
Pep believed that then, when Mourinho had the ability to drive men mad, even if increasingly he seems most skilled at tormenting himself.
Mourinho was generally regarded as having made a fine start to his career on Tuesday. Yet there is something wearing about Mourinho now, something that makes his public appearances draining, like getting on a train and finding that the only available space is next to a neighbour who has spent several years disputing a boundary at the end of your garden caused by an overhanging tree and who once again produces detailed ordnance maps which show where the roots of the tree began.
So Mourinho insists his record at producing youth players demands respect and the details are emailed to journalists. This is not a distraction, it is the thing.
Mourinho’s press conferences provide a glimpse into the workings of his mind, and for a manager who has relied upon his understanding of human psychology that gives these events some significance.
After all, last season as he moved from one intense and baffling media event to another, it was hard to detach Mourinho’s conspiratorial ramblings in press conferences from the suggestion that he was alienating some within the dressing room who may or may not have been guilty of betrayal.
It was all connected then as it might not be for a different manager, and it was all connected on Tuesday too as he used Lenny Pidgeley and Arjen Robben to make the case that he is the perfect manager for Manchester United.
This may turn out to be true, but it won’t be because of his record in youth development which if things go well will be incidental.
Pep may be happy to surrender press conferences to Mourinho, but they can’t be dismissed. They are where Mourinho gives us a glimpse of what’s going on.
