Flip through the latest issue of Gulf Weekly.
MY overwhelming emotion on discovering that Jose Mourinho had left
An absence of emotion. A numbness. An emptiness. I am filled with the knowledge that football has nothing to offer me any more.
Without Jose, football is dead to me. Without the teeniest possibility that I’ll catch a glimpse of him – in the terraces, on the bench, jumping up and down on the sidelines in a killer coat – why would I watch football on television ever again? Why would anyone?
My passion for Mourinho is multi-layered and nuanced.
It began a little over two years ago, just under a year after he arrived at
It’s partly based on him being, you know, dead handsome: a fully- fledged, rugged-faced, salt ‘n’ peppery, darkly brooding, sardonically eyebrowed dream of a man, to be specific.
Mourinho rode the vanguard of the retrosexual revolution of spring 2005, during which women turned their backs on such fragrant and moisturised lust icons as Jude Law and the gilded, over-preened, over-considered prettiness of David Beckham, and focused their fancying instead on Daniel Craig, Clive Owen – and my Jose.
Mourinho is intriguing because he’s an arrogant, charming, delicious, excitable soap opera in human form.
He is the antithesis of the ineloquent, cliche-spouting, hedge-straddling vortices of characters that otherwise populate the Premier League and its related factions.
Remember when he shushed an entire crowd? And when he said he was ‘the most special one’? And those facial expressions! The puffing out of the cheeks, the dismissive frowns, the sullen jaw- clenching, the moody scowl, the wry smiles ... Even more brilliant!
But my interest in Mourniho is mainly predicated on the fact that Jose knows his fashion.
Not in the dress-by-numbers, wear what your stylist tells you, titillate-the-paps way that Beckham knows fashion, but in a genuinely hot, Euro way.
Most of all, of course, he knows the power of a statement coat. Never mind the trophies or the multiple league wins – Mourinho’s greatest achievement in my book was to take a single-breasted grey cashmere Armani overcoat and turn it into a signature piece.
Thus, he introduced the men of
Which is not to say his sense of style has been unfaltering. He’s made some fashion errors, and my feelings for him have fluctuated accordingly.
The first time I saw him without the coat, for example, I wondered if his shoulders sloped down in an unbecoming way. It occurred to me that maybe I’d only ever fancied the coat, not the man. But I got over that. I was then annoyed to discover I was not the only woman on the planet to have fallen for him.
One newspaper proved as much when it ran a cut-out-and-keep guide on transforming the significant male other in your life into a Mourinho-alike.
So you see, my crush on Jose has depth and range. It’s not mindless or uncritical; it recognises his failings and it recognises his significance. All of which should give you some idea of the kind of gaping hole Jose’s departure will leave in my life.
That’s why football is dead to me – to me and to the myriad other women who started, for the first time in their lives, to enjoy footie. Never mind the menfolk who, without his influence, will presumably start ambling about in a styleless, ugly, nylon-coated limbo all over again.
Jose’s been snatched from us, just as it was getting sufficiently cold for him to debut his new season’s overcoat. Which is perhaps the cruellest blow of all.
