A parting of ways

Although a deal is yet to be struck between Mourinho and Chelsea, his return is virtually assured.He wants to return. Chelsea are searching for a new manager.

Jose Mourinho must have known that this was going to be a mountain too high to climb. The damage had been done in Germany the week before when a rampant Dortmund battered his Real Madrid. The look on his face then was to reappear at the Santiago Bernabue, and it was a look of resignation.

Mourinho, standing there in an oversized sports jacket and not his usual designer trench coat and seeing his men huff and puff at a Dortmund house that just wouldn’t fall, must have known that the end was nigh.

There have been some successes for his Real Madrid, tremendous in fact, if you consider that the opposition-in-chief over the last three years was a relentless Barcelona, but it is the failure to land ‘La Decima’ that stands out more because it represents a mutual failing for both employer and employee.

For Real Madrid ‘La Decima’ continues to be elusive for at least another year, while for the Portuguese he can’t, for now at least, be the first man to win the Champions league in three different countries.

This joint short-coming may have the overall effect of delivering an amicable excuse for divorce. Besides there is very little left to achieve in this fragile union between Mourinho and Madrid and the possibility of staying on to fight another year calls for patience, a quality that neither Real Madrid nor the man have demonstrated in the last decade alone.

And when everything is considered, it is actually a nice time to leave for Jose Mourinho. For one he dethroned eternal nemesis Barcelona, and even if that was once out of three times it brought with it a tremendous sense of accomplishment at a personal and club level.

Secondly there is no love lost between the Spanish press and Mourinho. If he goes, they will have played their roll in hounding him out.
Thirdly it appears not everyone in the dressing room sends Mourinho dinner invites.

So when your battles are fought and your allies are diminishing, it seems like a particularly nice time to leave the arena and all that is left is for a hand to be offered to pull you out of the mire.
And that hand might just have been extended by the semi-final Champion League exit at the hands of Dortmund.

Of course a man of his caliber will find a job and it has been whispered before that the man engineers his own exits and therefore his next jobs.

The noveau-ambitious like PSG and Manchester City wouldn’t surprise anyone by changing managers this summer and above all it isn’t a secret that the Chelsea job is very available and a prodigal son scenario would be this summers’ best seller.

If it happens at all, it will be because of a mutual parting of ways between a man burdened by his own high standards and a club raffled by its sometimes unrealistic demands.

And maybe this is just what Jose needs for in the place of his once handsome-rogue looks are the deep furrows dug by the irritations of unfulfilled dreams.

You know it’s time to leave your job when it makes you look more like Arsene Wenger and less like George Clooney.

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