Jose Mourinho and the Sacchi influence

Franco Baresi is one of the first names to come to anybody’s mind when you men­tion the Libero (or sweeper) posi­tion, sim­ply because he was the on-field gen­eral and sym­bol of Arrigo Sacchi’s great Milan side in the late 1980s; a side that arguably boasted one of the great­est defences of all time. Bear­ing in mind that the libero posi­tion seems to have all but died at the top level of Euro­pean foot­ball, it per­haps seems a lit­tle far­fetched to com­pare Sac­chi, the man who utilised this posi­tion almost like no one else in mod­ern day foot­ball, with Jose Mour­inho, who many believe to be fairly rigid, con­ser­v­a­tive and  con­ven­tional in his tac­ti­cal sys­tems. How­ever, dig your snout just below the sur­face and you’ll soon begin to realise that the two aren’t as far apart in their ideals as you or I may first have first believed.

Whilst it is true that gen­uine Liberos are few and far between at present, there are grow­ing mur­murs that we are on the cusp of another period of free-moving, ball-playing cen­tral defend­ers being com­mon­place within the game. Ger­ard “Piquen­bauer” Piqué’s free-roaming role this sea­son at Barcelona can eas­ily be used to demon­strate this, but Mour­inho has been explor­ing the idea since the dawn of time…well, for a while any­way. At Porto and Chelsea, Ricardo Car­valho was afforded the free­dom to charge mer­rily for­ward as he pleased, in the knowl­edge that he would have open space ahead of him and the pro­tec­tion of a defen­sive mid­fielder in behind. With a lot of defen­sive atten­tion now being focused on restrict­ing maraud­ing full backs such as Maicon, Patrice Evra and Daniel Alves, Mour­inho quickly recog­nised that there was room for cen­tral defend­ers to once again become an attack­ing influ­ence in the game.

At Inter­nazionale, how­ever, he has taken the Sac­chi influ­ence to a whole new level. Chris­t­ian Chivu was the first Inter player to oper­ate in the ball-playing defen­sive role before Brazil­ian defender Lúcio was even­tu­ally signed to take over, pre­sum­ably because of his extra pace and drive in pos­ses­sion, with Chivu mov­ing out to left back. In a way, I see this as a tremen­dous trib­ute to Baresi, sim­ply because Mour­inho feels it takes two of his technically-gifted defend­ers to have the same sort of influ­ence that Baresi did back in the 80s and early 90s, or at least that he’s really strug­gling to find the per­fect player for that role. It is also worth not­ing that Inter are cur­rently being strongly linked with Miguel Veloso from Sport­ing Clube De Por­tu­gal – a player who twenty years ago would almost undoubt­edly have been used as a Libero, with his posi­tional aware­ness, com­posed play­ing style, impres­sive vision and vast array of pass­ing. Per­haps Mour­inho believes he could develop into the per­fect cre­ative defender/sweeper.

The ques­tion is, though, why is it so impor­tant to the self-confessed spe­cial one (and Sac­chi before him) for his defend­ers to influ­ence foot­ball matches with the ball at their feet? The same answer applies to both man­agers — they want to phys­i­cally dom­i­nate the mid­field area. AC Milan pri­mar­ily used Frank Rijkaard and Ruud Gul­lit to aggres­sively press and over­run oppo­si­tion mid­fields, which then allowed the likes of Baresi and Van Bas­ten a greater level of free­dom to dic­tate the flow of the game either side of the mid­field. At Inter, it is the likes of Este­ban Cam­bi­asso, Thi­ago Motta, Dejan Stankovic, Javier Zanetti and Sul­ley Muntari who are expected to ful­fil a sim­i­lar press­ing role when selected. It has often been a crit­i­cism of Mour­inho that he’s too keen to sign big mid­field destroy­ers in favour of the more cul­tured option, but there you have the clear rea­son for this – he feels there is very lit­tle need for them.

Ahead of such a phys­i­cal, nul­li­fy­ing mid­field, it is absolutely vital that the cen­tre for­ward is able to hold the ball up and cre­ate chances out of very lit­tle. Van Bas­ten was the ulti­mate pro­to­type for mod­ern cen­tre for­wards with incred­i­ble aware­ness, dev­as­tat­ing power and a highly impres­sive knack of pop­ping up with breath­tak­ing vol­leys and dri­ves from range. Zla­tan Ibrahi­movic, Internazionale’s pride, tal­is­man and inspi­ra­tion until his recent move to Barcelona, seemed to fit that descrip­tion almost down to the tee. He may be a player that divides opin­ion amongst many, but the way he car­ried Inter, at least domes­ti­cally, can­not be denied even by the harsh­est of cyn­ics. His basic attrib­utes and abil­i­ties resem­ble those of Van Bas­ten closely, whether he utilises them as effec­tively or not. In par­al­lel to the task of match­ing Baresi’s influ­ence with both Chivu and Lúcio, it’s taken not only the goalscor­ing efforts of Samuel Eto’o and in par­tic­u­lar the highly impres­sive Diego Mil­ito to replace Ibrahi­movic, but also the cre­ative influ­ence of the Dutch play­maker behind them, Wes­ley Snei­jder. Ibra was more than just a goalscorer – he was able to oper­ate as a lone tar­get­man, a play­maker or on-the-shoulder striker when­ever required.

The sim­i­lar­i­ties between Sac­chi and Mour­inho actu­ally stretch beyond the tac­tics they imple­ment, although these fur­ther sim­i­lar­i­ties can still be linked to the sys­tems as well. Just like Sacchi’s great team, Mour­inho is now build­ing an impe­ri­ous, solid, con­sis­tent and highly stub­born side at Inter as they look set to stroll to another Serie A title despite the best efforts of an AC Milan side inspired by a revi­talised Ronald­inho. Should Inter win the league again this year, and you have to imag­ine they will fol­low­ing their sec­ond com­fort­able win over their Milan rivals this sea­son, they will have won five Serie A titles in a row – some­thing which has only ever been achieved once before in Italy, by Carlo Carcano’s leg­endary Juven­tus side of the 1930s. This record has not been built on a foun­da­tion of daz­zling free-flowing foot­ball, but rather the old Milanese men­tal­ity of “We shall not be beaten or intim­i­dated”. Purists may not be con­vinced, but whilst Inter con­tinue to win titles, the Ner­az­zurri fol­low­ing will be pre­pared to sac­ri­fice attack­ing foot­ball as they grad­u­ally claw away at Juven­tus’ total of twenty seven Serie A titles (Inter cur­rently have seventeen).

An espe­cially inter­est­ing fact is that nei­ther Sac­chi nor Mour­inho had par­tic­u­larly spec­tac­u­lar play­ing careers. In fact, they barely even scratched the sur­face of the world foot­ball scene, and you’d do well to even find some­one out­side of their respec­tive home towns who can hon­estly claim to vividly remem­ber them as foot­ballers. Mour­inho had a short, mod­est pay­ing career in Por­tu­gal with Rio Ave (a club his father coached at the time), Bele­nenses and Ses­im­bra but never did he threaten to make a gen­uine impact at any of these clubs. Sac­chi, mean­while, had spent the major­ity of his play­ing days with Ital­ian ama­teur side, Fusig­nano CF. Indeed; it is true that many of today’s top tac­ti­cians have come from pretty unin­spir­ing play­ing back­grounds, from Sir Alex Fer­gu­son to Guus Hid­dink, and Unai Emery to Wal­ter Maz­zarri. The com­mon theme is that these coaches are gen­uine stu­dents of the game, often with a solid edu­ca­tion in the game out­side of their play­ing career, and develop a pas­sion for the deeper, more intri­cate side of foot­ball long before they even approach the typ­i­cal retire­ment age for a foot­baller. To quote Sac­chi him­self, “A jockey doesn’t have to have been born a horse”.

The one key dif­fer­ence between the two coaches’ sides is the rel­a­tive gulf in qual­ity in key areas. Baresi to Lúcio, Van Bas­ten to Ibrahi­movic and per­haps to a lesser extend, Rijkaard to Cam­bi­asso — whilst Mour­inho employs play­ers who ful­fil sim­i­lar roles, their infe­rior qual­ity, par­tic­u­larly in mid­field, is the one thing hold­ing them back from reg­u­larly chal­leng­ing for the Euro­pean Cup. Their domes­tic record of late has been aston­ish­ing (in an admit­tedly trou­bled time for Ital­ian foot­ball), but Inter aren’t yet the fin­ished arti­cle by any means, and will have to con­tinue to progress if peo­ple are to men­tion them in the same sen­tence as Sacchi’s great Milan side more often.

Photo credit: Joker_milanoo

Tagged as: Arrigo Sacchi, Jose Mourinho