Mourinho complaints against Reading FC's medical staff and the
Berkshire ambulance service following the injuries to Petr Cech and
Carlo Cudicini on Saturday.
One of the ambulance men who took Cech to hospital said yesterday:
"Our reputation has been tarnished." He could hardly have been
further from the truth. Only one reputation was tarnished in the
aftermath of the unfortunate and regrettable injuries to Cech and
Cudicini, and that belongs to Mourinho himself.
And this is, of course, a reputation that was discoloured long ago.
The trouble with Mourinho's outbursts is that no objective outsider
can now believe a word he says. After the unfounded suggestion that
Frank Rijkaard visited the referee's room at half-time in the Nou
Camp two seasons ago, and the much advertised 120-page dossier of
alleged misbehaviour by Arsenal towards Chelsea, which turned out
to be nothing more than a bunch of press cuttings, Chelsea's
manager forfeited a great deal of his credibility. A bit more of it
disappeared when he compared Stephen Hunt's collision with Cech to
the notorious and heavily punished assaults committed in the last
year by Michael Essien and Ben Thatcher, and the rest went over the
horizon when he alleged that his No1 goalkeeper's transfer to
hospital had been unnecessarily delayed, blaming everyone but his
own medical staff.
Reading's response was notable for its precision and suffused with
a controlled anger. Doubt had been cast on the integrity of their
efforts on behalf of an injured man, and they were able to produce
evidence in their own defence. Given the identity of their accuser,
they had little trouble finding a sympathetic audience.
Mourinho's approach, however, is not the way to do it. Such wild
accusations do greater damage to the accuser than to the accused,
and a gifted coach will have lost even more admirers outside the
little world of Stamford Bridge.