Here's a proper translation of that Marca article. The other half kindly did it on her lunch break for me.
Jose Mourinho is now a troubled and lost manager, and wrong in his diagnosis about Real Madrid’s illnesses. It’s not a lack of attitude. Nobody failed to use their legs at Sevilla, no one forgot to run and to give their best. It was a bold match, as Relaño would say. One of many that has been played by Real Madrid under the yoke of Mourinho. The typical encounter that Madrid would win last season easily, with just a sneeze from Ronaldo filtering through the squad. The problem is much deeper but escapes banal and simplistic analysis from the trainer because it would point him out as the guiltiest -- which he is.
Real Madrid’s problem is that it doesn’t even play “tabas” [knuckle bones]. Even worse, it plays nothing. It happens so since Mourinho took charge of the team. Within the virtues that have taken it to win la Liga and to shift Barcelona’s throne, good playing precisely is not one of them. The virtues are the ones that have to do with the bugle’s call, living by the opponent’s defects, with counterattack football, with sucking the rival’s blood, with physical intensity and concentration, with the camouflage effect of Cristiano Ronaldo’s goals that so many evenings of bad play have covered.
Mourinho’s football is commonly used by small teams to avoid relegation. The biggest success by the manager has been converting his primary game in a system useful to win titles. In the short and medium term it works. But in the long run, Mourinho’s teams lack grandeur. And, also, if they coincide in time with a rival like Barcelona, the comparison results in being especially uncomfortable. The fan knows, even if he’s an associate and subscriber of Real Madrid, how some win and how others win. If the associate in question has years of antiquity and his arse peeled from sitting at the Bernabeu, he must be suffering authentic embarrassment.
DRAINING THE LUMP. Mourinho will never acknowledge it and will always bring debate to his field, to the mud in which he’s good handling himself: by distributing blame and draining the lump. Turning on the fan, so the small pieces of scattered manure stain others while his figure remains unpolluted, is the specialty of the house. This week it’s turn to blame the players, load them with the responsibility and turn the manager into a lateral character, secondary, at a margin of the team’s problems, as if the deal wasn’t with him. We have won, they have lost. From the manual. The typical character that would flee a hit-and-run scene after causing it. He’s done it when he was asked about Cristiano’s sadness. Suddenly, Mourinho ceased to be manager and spokesman of Real Madrid.
Turns out that being Valdano was more difficult than what it appeared to be. The Almighty has been incapable of superseding the figure of the yearned spokesman even in a press conference. The infantile case of the sad, lonely and abandoned crack, is the typical matter that Valdano would’ve taken care of in five minutes, in the midst of a horde of journalists, from the car window.
UNPURPOSE. The press conference of Sevilla was a unpurpose, a bulk error, a demonstration that Mourinho doesn’t know where he stands, a manifest incapability to detect the team’s problems, a permanent confusion of the arse with the temples. The coach, who brags so much about not throwing shite at his players, poured a whole bucket onto them. As a rhetorical figure, he auto-inflicted himself at some point, but it was more to not be left looking to the fans like he was taking advantage, than doing it for self-convincement. And everything under the acquiescence of the club that’s run by Florentino Mendes and Jorge Perez. Or was it Jorge Mendes and Florentino Perez? It’s all the same. Tomeito-tomato in the curious hegemony that brings this singular binomy. Mourinho says that, right now, he doesn’t have a team. What needs to be ascertained is whether Real Madrid has a manager or a hair-growing-products salesman.
