still did not know much about him. But of course, Mourinho was The Special one already back then, and I had heard a lot about him. He was supposed to be cocky and his press conferences were like shows and he said exactly what he felt. But I really didn’t know much and I thought like: He’s probably like Capello, a stone hard leader, and fine by me. I like that style. But I was wrong, partly anyway. Mourinho is a Portuguese, and he likes to be in the centre. He manipulates the players like no one else. Still that doesn’t say much.

The guy learned a lot from Bobby Robson. Robson is an old NT coach for England. He coached the club Sporting Clube de Portugal at that time and needed a translator, and it happened to be Mourinho. Mourinho was good at languages. But Robson realized soon that the guy knew about other things as well. The kid was a fast thinker and he was easy to exchange ideas with, and one day Robson asked him to write a report on an opposing team. I have no idea what he expected. Like what does a translator know? But Mourinho’s analysis was apparently totally first class.

Robson was just amazed. Here was a guy who had never played football on the highest level, but still could give him better material that he’d ever get. Like, damn, I have really underrated this translator. When Bobby Robson changed club, he took the guy with him and Mourinho learned things all the time, not only tactics and facts, but also psychological stuff. He used to say: “When your team is winning you’re a part of it. But when they lose you’re a bag of shit”, and eventually he became a coach himself in Porto. It was 2002. He was really unknown then. For many he was still The translator, and Porto may have been a nice team in Portugal.

But come on, it was no big club. Porto had ended up in the middle of the table the year before and the Portuguese league, what was that? Not much in comparison. No one counted on Porto in the European

cups, especially not in the CL. But Mourinho came to the club with something really new: total awareness for every detail in the opposition team, and sure, I didn’t understand any of it back then. But I was going to, believe me. At that time he talked a lot about transitions in football, when one teams attack is cut short and the guys must regroup really fast from attack to defense.

Those are important seconds. I situations like that one single unexpected maneuver, one little tactical mistake, can be decisive and Mourinho studied that closer than anyone in football and made the guys think analytical and fast. Porto became masters at using those situations, and against all odds they won not only the Portuguese league. They also played well in CL where they met teams like Manchester United and Real Madrid, clubs where one single player made as much money as the whole Porto team together. But Mourinho and his boys still won the CL.

It was like a big bang, and Mourinho became the hottest coach in the world. This was in 2004. Roman Abramovich, the Russian billionaire, had bought Chelsea and shoved money into the club, and first and foremost, he got Mourinho. But what do you think? That Mourinho was accepted in England? He was after all a foreigner. A Portuguese. Many snobs and journalists questioned him, and on one press conference he said:

“I’m not the guy from nowhere. I’ve won the CL with Porto. I’m special. I am a special one”, and that stuck with him.

Mourinho became The Special One in English media, but I guess they said it with as much mockery as respect, at least at first. The guy pissed people off. Not only because he looked like a movie star. He said cocky things. He knew his worth, and sometimes he went hard on the competition. When he thought that Arsene Wenger in Arsenal were fixated with his Chelsea, he talked about Wenger as one of those guys who had binoculars at home and look into other families windows. It was always a mess around Mourinho.

But he didn’t just talk. When he came to Chelsea the club had not won the league in fifty years. With Mourinho they won two years in a row. Mourinho was The Special one, and now he were on his way to us, and with his reputation on my mind I expected tough orders at once. But under EC they let me know that Mourinho was going to call me and I thought, has something happened?

He just wanted to talk. To say that it’s going to be fun working together, looking forward to meet you, nothing special, not then, but he spoke in Italian, I didn’t get it. Mourinho had never coached an Italian club. But still, he could speak better than me. He had learned the language in no time at all, in three weeks it’s said, and I didn’t understand at all. We started talking in English instead, and I felt it already then, he cared. He asks different questions, and after the game against Spain I got a text message.

I always get a lot of text messages. But this one was from Mourinho. Well played, he wrote and then he gave me some advice, and I promise, I jumped. I had never seen such a thing. A text message from the coach! I mean, I played with the NT, it wasn’t his business. But he cared, and I answered and got new messages. It was wow, Mourinho is watching me. I felt seen. The guy may not be so tough and hard after all.

But yeah, I got it, he had a purpose with his text’s. He wanted to trigger me. Create loyalty. But I liked him right away. We clicked. We understood each other, and I realized right away, this man works hard. He works double as much as everyone else. Watching football all day and all night and do his analyses. Never met a coach with so much knowledge about the opposition team. It’s not the usual, look they play like this and that, they have this and that tactic, and you have to watch out for this player. It was everything, every little detail, like, down to the shoe number of the third GK. It was everything. It was a feeling right away; this guy knows his thing.

But it took some time before I met him. It was EC and vacation, and I don’t really know what I expected. I had seen a lot of pictures of him. He was elegant, he sure of himself, but still, I was surprised. He was a short man with small shoulders, and he looked little amongst the players.

But I still felt it; there was a vibe around him. He got people to stand in line, and he went up to guys who thought they were untouchable and bossed them around. He stood there, one head shorter, and didn’t try to tune in, not at all. He went right to the point and said very coldly: From now on you do like this and like this. Do you get it! And everyone started to listen. They were tense to understand every shade in his words. Not that they were afraid of him. After all, he was no Capello. He created personal bonds to the players with his text messages and mail’s and his commitment and his knowledge about how he had it with our wife’s and children and he never shouted. People got it anyway, and everyone understood right away, this guy knows stuff. He works hard to prepare us. He built us before and up to the games. It was like a theatre, a psychological game. He could show us movies where we had played bad, and say: “Look at this! So bad! So hopeless! This can’t be you. It must be your brothers, the bad versions of you”, and we nodded, we agreed. We were ashamed.

“I don’t want to see you like that today!” he continued. No, no, we thought, not a chance. “Go out like hungry lions, like warriors”, he continued and we shouted: “Absolutely, nothing else is good enough.”

“In the first duel you should be like this...”, he went on about. He hit his fist in his palm. “And in the second duel...”

He kicked the bulletin board so that it flew away in the room, and the adrenaline started to boil in us, and we went out like wild people. It was stuff like that all the time, unexpected things that triggered us, and I felt more and more, this guy gives everything for the team, so I want to give everything for him. It was some sort of quality he had. You wanted to kill for him. But it wasn’t just about pep talk. The guy could put you down with a couple of words, like come in to the dressing room at be really cold and say:

“You have done zero today, Zlatan, zero. You haven’t done shit”, and in moments like this I didn’t shout back.

I didn’t defend myself one bit, not because I was scared or had excessive respect for him, but because I understood that he was right. I hadn’t done a thing, and for Mourinho it didn’t mean shit what you have done yesterday or the day before that. The actual day was what was important. It was now: “Get out there and play football.”

I remember a game against Atalanta. The day after I was going to accept the award for best foreign player and best player in Serie A, but when the first half was over we were down two-zero and I had been kind of invisible, and in the locker room Mourinho came up to me.

“You’re getting awards tomorrow, right?”

“Uhm, yes.”

“Do you know what you should say when you accept the award?” “No, what?”

“You should be ashamed. You should blush. You should know that you haven’t won a shit. One can’t be given prizes when they’re so worthless. You should give away that prize to your mom, or someone who deserves it better”, he said and felt: I’ll show him, he’ll see that I’m worth that award, just wait for the second half, doesn’t matter if I start spitting blood, I’ll show him. I’ll dominate again.

It was stuff like that all the time. He pumped me up and broke me down. He was a master at manipulating the team, and there was only one thing that really bothered me, his facial expression when we played. Didn’t matter what I did, or what kind of goals I scored, he always had that ice cold look on his face. There were never smiles or gestures, anything at all. It was like nothing had happened at all, like it was slow play in the middle of the pitch, and by then I was better than ever. I did amazing stuff, but on Mourinho it looked like it was raining.

For example, we played against Bologna, and in the twenty fourth minute Adriano, the Brazilian, dribbled on the left flank. He made a cross, a hard one that was too low for me to put my head on it and to high to shot on volley, and I was really jostled in the penalty area. But I took one step forward and made a back heel. It looked like a karate kick, just bam, straight in the net. It was sick. It was later chosen as goal of the year, and the crowd went crazy, people stood up and shouted and applauded, everyone, even Moratti in his honorary seat.

But Mourinho, What did he do? He stood there in his suit and with his hands down his pockets with a cold stone face. What the hell is wrong with that man, I thought. If he doesn’t react on something like that, what gets him going then?

I talked to Rui Faria about that. Rui Faria is from Portugal as well. He’s a fitness coach and Mourinho’s

right hand. Those two have followed each other from club to club and know each other really, really well.

“Explain one thing for me”, I told him.

“Alright, sure!”

“I have scored goals this season that I really don’t know myself how I managed to do them. I don’t think Mourinho has ever seen anything like them. But still he just stands there like a statue.”

“Take it easy kid”, Rui said. “He’s like that. He doesn’t react like the rest of us.”

Maybe not, I thought. But still... I’ll fucking make sure to spark some life into him, even if I have to do a miracle. In one way or another I’ll make that man cheer.