Iker Casillas looking to land next blow in bitter rivalry with Jose Mourinho
After referees, team doctors, and broken computers, Jose Mourinho has found a new scapegoat for Chelsea’s slow start to the season. Speaking at a press conference ahead of Tuesday’s Champions League clash with Porto, the Blues manager highlighted a lack of what he described as "serial champions" in his squad.
"There are two sorts of champions," stated Mourinho. "There are those who win something, and there are lots of them. But there are the other champions who, during their career, win one, two, three, four, five, 10 or 20 titles … John Terry, John [Obi] Mikel and [Branislav] Ivanovic are serial champions. Almost every season they have something in the pocket. But how many other serial champions do we have?"
The question that perhaps should have been put to him, at this point, was whether he would prefer to switch squads with his opponents. As winners of seven out of the last 10 Primeira Liga titles, Porto have plenty of serial champions on their books. No other player comes close in this department, though, to the goalkeeper that Mourinho once cast aside.
Iker Casillas will set a new Champions League record on Tuesday, overtaking Xavi as the player with the most appearances (151) in this competition. He has won it three times, most recently in 2014, as well as lifting a World Cup and two European Championships with Spain, and claiming five La Liga titles with Real Madrid.
Mourinho was his manager for the last of those domestic triumphs, but has since claimed to wish this success had gone differently. Asked upon leaving Madrid whether he had any regrets, the Portuguese said he "should have brought in Diego Lopez after my first year [in the summer of 2011]. We didn’t do enough to sign him."
Taken at face value, it was an extraordinary statement. Winning La Liga in 2011-12 was Mourinho’s greatest achievement at Madrid, and yet here he was trying to convince us that the one thing he would correct from his otherwise underwhelming three-year tenure would be to employ a different goalkeeper from the start of that campaign.
But we should all know better than to take Mourinho’s words at face value by now. His comment was designed more than anything as a personal dig at Casillas – whom he finally did replace with Lopez after the former player broke a bone in his hand in January 2013. Their working relationship had fractured long before that.
The story goes that Mourinho never forgave Casillas for phoning Xavi to make peace after a furiously bad-tempered Clasico in the 2011 Spanish Super Cup – a clash which ended with the Madrid manager poking Tito Vilanova in the eye. In truth, he had grown frosty towards Casillas long before that day, suspecting the player of leaking information to the press via his journalist girlfriend Sara Carbonero.
Straightforward footballing considerations did play into Mourinho’s thinking – even if it is hard to know where they intersected with personal sentiment. As a coach, he has always preferred tall goalkeepers, and there was some truth to the suggestion that Lopez, despite being a less impressive shot-stopper, was better at dealing with crosses.
Mourinho is not the only one to have doubted Casillas’ talent in recent years. Carlo Ancelotti continued to use Lopez in La Liga throughout his first season in charge. Few disputed the suggestion that David De Gea would represent a significant upgrade for Madrid this summer, right up until the club failed to submit its paperwork on time.
Casillas, though, is hardly finished at 34 years old. He demonstrated his enduring athleticism in one of his very first appearances for Porto, making a remarkable penalty stop from Valencia’s Joao Cancelo in preseason.
Since then he has kept three clean sheets in six league games, including one during a victory over reigning champions Benfica – a result he celebrated with aplomb.
He had wished dearly to play out his whole career at Madrid, but might one day be able to reflect that this move served him much better than staying put would have done. Mourinho, after all, is not the only one who recognises how difficult it is to remain a "serial winner" throughout the course of a career.
Reflecting on the 12-year gap between second and third Champions League victories at Madrid, Casillas told the Guardian last year that: "When you have won two European Cups at 20, it’s true that you do wonder if you’ll end up with five or six. It seems easy, but it isn’t.
"People stop appreciating how difficult it is if you win it every year. It can be hard to motivate people."
It would be impossible for anyone, Casillas included, to maintain the same level of focus all through a long career. But there is nothing quite like an enforced move to shake you out of a comfort zone. Just ask Andrea Pirlo, whose career truly did seem to be drifting before Milan shoved him unceremoniously out the door.
Casillas might not play in another Champions League final, as the Italy midfielder did, but he will have an opportunity to chase new goals and trophies at Porto that he has never won before. Nights such as this one, meanwhile, can provide him with a stage to remind us of what a talent he still possesses.
The opportunity to get one over on Mourinho renders this match against Chelsea all the more alluring. Casillas would like nothing better than to join his former manager’s growing list of scapegoats this evening.