He did not take off his medal and stuff it in his pocket. He wore it proudly. He did not walk away to hide himself, as ostentatiously as a man hiding himself could possibly contrive to do, in the shadows of the dugout. Instead he went straightaway to applaud the fans dancing in ecstasy on the northern face of the mighty Bernabéu, then hugged his players and shook hands with their opponents. He hoisted his son, José Jr, wearing a black and blue No10 shirt, on to his shoulders, before setting him down, picking up the match ball and a Portuguese flag, and making his way to embrace his president.
This time José Mourinho was on his very best behaviour, as he had been all week. Once again he was starring in his own movie. But he was showing the world – and his employers, present and future – that he could also win one of football's biggest prizes with dignity.
There could have been no better setting for this display of his talents than the home of an organisation whose nine victories in the European Cup give them a special identification with the greatest of club tournaments. The near-certainty that it will become Mourinho's own next home only added to the evening's resonance. He will, he said, be meeting Florentino Pérez, the president of Real Madrid, today. He may or may not have been winding us up. Probably not. The contract is said to extend over four years, at €10m (£8.7m) a year, and the pre-season gathering is scheduled for a country-house hotel in County Kildare in the first week of August.
"I don't know this project yet," he replied when asked, long after midnight, about a summer move from Lombardy to Castille. "I'm not the coach of Real Madrid. I'm very, very proud to be the coach of Inter. Should I become the coach of Real Madrid it will be because they are a club of huge dimensions, and they want me to do what I have done at other clubs: to win."
He ran, as he is prone to do with only the slightest encouragement, through his list of achievements in Portugal, England and Italy. "Real Madrid will just be another club who want to win important things," he added. "But to do that, you need spirit and you must be able to build a team that works together. Internazionale has become a wonderful family. Everyone worked hard to achieve that, from the groundsman to the players on the pitch and the ones who had to stay on the bench. We have created a family, and that's the most important thing."
For all his sometimes toxic behaviour, it is undeniable that, wherever he goes, Mourinho wins the respect and affection of his squad and staff, and Saturday night's victory removed the last doubts over his standing as one of the game's great coaches. To have captured the European Cup on slender resources with FC Porto, to have taken Chelsea to their first English league title in half a century, and to make Inter kings of Europe for the first time in 45 years – all in a mere seven years – is an astonishing record.
Against whom do we measure him? Two names constantly come up: those of Helenio Herrera and Brian Clough. Il Mago, the architect of Inter's glory years in the mid-60s, is the most obvious comparison. Mourinho builds his teams on a similar foundation of ruthless defence, but there is always scope for artists – Deco at Porto, Frank Lampard at Chelsea, Wesley Sneijder at Inter – and great strikers, such as Didier Drogba and Diego Milito, to express themselves. Herrera, too, had Sandro Mazzola, Jair, Mario Corso and Luis Suárez.
Like Clough, Mourinho concentrates on the art of counterattacking. Analysing Porto's victory in the 2004 final, he explained how, of the four training days leading up to the match, one was devoted to the transition from defence to attack, and another to the transition from attack to defence. It was part, he said, of his methodology. It seems unlikely Clough or Peter Taylor ever used the terms "transition" and "methodology" at Derby County or Nottingham Forest, but the result was remarkably similar: teams designed to break forward with speed, purpose and a beautiful economy.
In one area above all Mourinho is definitely Clough's superior: for all his volatility, his iconoclasm and his provocations, he knows how to handle the pressures of life in football's penthouse suite. Having shown, with Porto, that he could prosper in a comparatively modest setting, he went on to meet the demands of two men, Roman Abramovich and Massimo Moratti, for whom nothing but the very best would do. Perhaps he is not, after all, inherently as volatile and iconoclastic as he seems, just a very clever man with an unusually wide array of psychological weapons at his disposal.
After Saturday, however, it would be foolish to believe that mind games are his strongest suit. Inter's mastery of the match, after they had soaked up an opening half-hour of constant bombardment, culminated in two of the loveliest goals you could ever see in a European Cup final, the first an example of Route One in excelsis and the second a clean incision through the Bayern defence, each culminating in a perfectly judged finish from Milito.
Mourinho spoke generously of his time at Inter, but left his listeners in no doubt about the crucial nature of his own contribution to their historic treble. The only part of the season he did not enjoy, he said, were the weeks he had to watch their Serie A matches from the grandstands while serving a touchline ban. "In the two months I had to be in the stands," he explained, "I saw my team go from a lead of 10 points to second place. That didn't please me."
Next, it seems, Mourinho will be dealing with Pérez and with Real Madrid's needy afición, who yearn not just to remove Barcelona from their perch at the top of La Liga but for a 10th European Cup triumph. On past form, the challenge of dismantling the club's surviving cliques and building a structure to support Cristiano Ronaldo, Kaká, Gonzalo Higuaín and Karim Benzema should be relatively straightforward.
Like his Porto, Chelsea and Inter sides, Mourinho's Real will play from the back and become experts in the business of neutralising known dangers, but the quality of the forwards is a guarantee of entertainment. And once he has met those targets, perhaps within a couple of years, Old Trafford and the biggest test of all will surely open its arms to this brilliant, restless man.
Richard Williams
