They’re out to get Jose Mourinho. All of them.
They’re disallowing his goals; they’re banning him from stadiums; they’re suing him. they’re saying they’d rather lose than win. They’re laughing at him.
But this is no laughing matter. This is a man, a once-proud man, who has become a victim of everyone and everything that isn’t Jose Mourinho.
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It’s The World versus Jose, and The World is winning. The World always does. But that doesn’t make it right, or funny.
They don’t know; they don’t see.
They only watch him during matches, and sometimes after, making faces and swearing at women and referees. They don’t see the hurt, the emptiness. How can they?
How can they see Jose awake, Jose wash the sleep from his eyes, Jose shave each morning, sometimes twice? How can they see him trod down the stairs to his breakfast, his coffee cold and his Cornflakes soggy?
How can they hear the Enya he puts on and appreciate the soft vocals, soothing melodies, and supernatural reverberations?
They can’t. They’ll never understand. And they don’t want to. They only want to see him fail.
They want to see Dynamo Kyiv beat Chelsea on Wednesday, and they want Jose to make faces while it happens. He’s just a clown to them, a fool. A David Bowie, as media scholar Nicholas Greco explains, who has destroyed his celebrity on purpose. An oddity they can’t stop staring at.
He is abused. He may soon disappear.
He’ll not be at Britannia Stadium Saturday. They’ve confined him to his hotel in Stoke for the match. But at least he’ll have sparkling water. And they’ll not get to gape at his crooked tie, creased trousers and untucked shirt. Gawkers.
Still, they’ll talk about him. They always do. About mutinies and Eden Hazard and lawsuits and Eva Carneiro. About his job, and what he’ll do should he lose it.
And he might. And maybe he wants to.
Maybe he wants a break, to go away for a while, to find enjoyment again. The sort of enjoyment football can’t give, that no one thing can give. Like Siddhartha, he might suppress and deconstruct Self, that Self that burdens him and makes faces, and mercifully discover peace and enlightenment.
He might walk daily to the Thames and sit down and listen, listen to the river.
But first he must put himself in front of them again. He must take his team to Stamford Bridge and talk to them, look at them, and deploy them against Dynamo Kyiv. And then he must watch them, while they watch him.
And they’ll watch a broken man and talk about his brokenness. About his faces and swearing and lawsuits and mutinies. And Jose, the victim, will know what they say and become what they talk about, for they have made him and they can unmake him.
They are cruel and their cruelty desolates him, hollows him.
They’re out to get Jose Mourinho. And they’ve almost got him.