If the praise of one’s peers is the highest accolade, José Mourinho may be particularly pleased with what Gianluca Vialli said about him after Inter Milan’s 1-0 victory over Claudio Ranieri’s Juventus, which helped the nerazzurrito extend their lead at the top of Serie A.
“José reminds me of Nietzsche’s Superman,” Vialli, a studio pundit on Saturday, said. “The Superman has to learn to embrace adversity in order to overcome it and become even stronger. Well, Mourinho adores adversity.”
Before we get carried away, there is no real consensus as to what Friedrich Nietzsche really meant when he spoke of the Übermensch in his classic Thus Spoke Zarathustra. But if we take Vialli’s definition at face value, it does neatly sum up Mourinho’s present experience in Serie A.
This season he has taken on allcomers, seemingly seeking confrontation rather than avoiding it. It’s almost an ethos of “that which does not kill me only makes me stronger”. And, crucially, he has evolved with it. Saturday night in many ways epitomised this.
Don’t let the scoreline fool you. It was a high-tempo, high-intensity match with plenty of entertainment, one in which Zlatan Ibrahimovic was, at once, brilliant at creating chances and dreadful at taking them. A game in which Mourinho won the tactical battle against Ranieri, who, despite various mitigating factors (a number of absentees, losing Tiago to injury after a few minutes), probably would have been second best regardless.
It’s a credit to Mourinho that, for a man who travels through life surrounded by his own personal mythology, he was able to shatter many of those same myths. Take his tactical approach. The assumption was that he would replicate the 4-3-3 formation he so successfully used in his first two seasons at Chelsea. That is why he spent £25 million to secure two genuine wingers, Mancini from Roma and Ricardo Quaresma from Porto. But when that set-up failed to satisfy him, he switched to 4-2-4, putting a second striker alongside Ibrahimovic and keeping his wingers. That lasted until a few weeks ago, when he introduced 4-3-1-2.
That ability to change formations is not something we saw during Mourinho’s time in England, except, of course, when he was handed Michael Ballack and Andriy Shevchenko and told to find a way to make it work.
But that was imposed from above. Mourinho’s shifts this season have been of his own making. “At Chelsea I had a very mobile front three and if I have players like that, 4-3-3 is my preferred choice,” he said. “Here I have front players who are maybe stronger and more technical, so I have to play differently. It’s not a problem for me. If the players are clever, you can play any formation as long as it suits their characteristics.”
Equally impressive has been his man-management. The tactical keys to the Juventus match were Adriano, the big Brazilian who joined Ibrahimovic up front, and Dejan Stankovic, in the hole behind them.
Between them, the pair had made nine Serie A starts this season.
Adriano was (and is) seen as a disciplinary problem. He was late for training, spent too much time in night-clubs and returned to Milan from national duty in Brazil only 48 hours before the Juventus match, telling the media waiting at the airport that he needed to have words with Mourinho. Stankovic, loyal to Mourinho’s predecessor, Roberto Mancini, said he felt out of place under the new regime and the media speculated that he would be on his way in January.
Yet Mourinho put his faith in both, even at the price of excluding a man such as Patrick Vieira – “Mourinho had better explain to me why I didn’t start,” he grumbled after the game – and they repaid him handsomely.
“I need Adriano to play like that, like an animal,” Mourinho said, before heaping equal praise on Stankovic. “Tonight, he was a midfielder and he was a striker, it was like playing with 12 men.”
Mourinho proved that he can change his tactical approach and face adversity head on. Those qualities alone may not make him an Übermensch, but they show that there is definitely something Nietzschean about him.
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