Can you compare Clough and Mourinho?
The Evening Post has gone a bit obsessed with the Clough/Mourinho comparison - hardly relevant given the mighty BC parted ways with Forest fourteen years ago, but it’s a comparison that’s been drawn before now. Famed for his arrogance and self-belief, it’s certainly easy to see why the similarities between the two men has been picked upon by journalists. I suppose comparing across the ages is difficult - football is now a very different game to what it was back in Cloughie’s heyday.
James Robson of the post has a go at it, and doesn’t make a bad fist of it I suppose. It’s true that Cloughie was no fan of chairmen at all, and wouldn’t tolerate them interfering - and Mourinho is showing hints of irritation with his boss right now, but I suppose the difficulty that Clough never had to contend with was the fact that players at the top level are now considered celebrities and superstars to global proportions - even lowly division three Forest players think they’re some kind of big shots!
Garry Birtles opts instead to try to rank the two managers against one another, a rather futile exercise given that they are in effect operating within different games with different rules. Certainly if you were to divide trophies won by resources spent, then it’s a no-brainer, Cloughie wins hands down - although Jose has a few years ahead of him to play catch-up, all in all, I can’t really envisage a sensible way of comparing the two - the only reason the journalistic impulse is there is because of the similarities in their public personas.
To finally compound their comparisons, they have published a few classic Cloughisms, along with some classic Mourinhoisms. Certainly Cloughie wins again in terms of being able to put ‘isms’ on the end of his name without it looking a bit silly. All in all though, I think it’s not fair to compare - my biasedness will always elevate Sir Brian ahead of any other manager you can name, but you can’t compare him to a modern manager, who must deal with unprecidented media coverage, the ever-present agents and multi-millionnaire footballers.
Ultimately, nobody compares to Brian Clough - but how would he have fared in an era when if he were to practice some of his discipline techniques he would probably have been sued? He wouldn’t have been able to avoid agents, and in an era when footballers are much more athletic and fitness orientated, would his piss-ups on the eve of important Cup Finals really have proven the masterstrokes they might have been back in his day? I guess we’ll never know!
25 January, 2007 at 2:46 pm
Well nffc, I think Im more biased than you
and certainly believe that BC (RIP) is top since he did not have ultramegamillions to spend (despite the 999,999 pound Francis transfer!). BC had a flair than Murmurinho just doesn’t possess: He took on players on the brink of career catastrophy (ie Robertson, Lloyd or even Burns) and graciously offered them to their national teams (England, Scotland etc.). JM buys a player only when he is already a big name and sometimes he manages to wear him down (the cases of Shevchenko, Mutu, Wright-Phillips et al are characteristic). Moreover, there’s a long string of young players whom Cloughie took from the academies and raised into superstars (Woodcock, Birtles, Webb, Hodge, Clough Jr, Keane, the list goes on forever). Just tell me which player Murmurinho has helped to progress. Lampard, Joe Cole, Terry etc were all established names when he came over. OK, he has won two championship titles, when Arsenal, Man Utd and Pool were all having consistency problems. But could he take i.e. Watford or Reading and make them win the league in the first time of asking? Then win the Champions League in his first appearance as well after eliminating the defending champion in the first round? No way Jose… I also think that the late Brian, a great believer in the qualities of British football, would never accept a Russian chairman over his (big) head or nine foreigners in his starting XI. Bosman or not!!!
25 January, 2007 at 3:20 pm
Well the short answer is “Yes, you can”, because it seems everybody IS comparing the two. I agree, nffc, it is a bit unfair to CC, since he’s the current “special one” at the City Ground. No one will ever do what Clough did, because time has moved on and the game is now very different. What would be very interesting would be if Mourinho were to take on a Championship club struggling just now, and see if he could turn them round and win promotion in the following season, and then get in Europe the next year. Not as champions - that’s impossible since all the money is in the Big Four, and is going to stay that way with this new deal. In terms of character, you can equate Shankley, Clough, Mourinho, et al, but then it’s down to personal taste.
26 January, 2007 at 11:32 am
Of course, Mourinho hasn’t got anything like the playing stats that Clough has - but then neither have most players since football began…