The Portuguese manager certainly made an impact on one Tottenham Hotspur striker during his time at the north London club
Carlos Vinicius believes his former Tottenham head coach Jose Mourinho is the best manager he has ever had and recounted the story of how he earned the Portuguese’s trust.
Vinicius, now 31 and scoring plenty of goals back home in Brazil for Gremio, played just a single season at Spurs when he moved on loan from Benfica for the 2020/21 campaign. That meant he got to experience just over six months of working with Mourinho, who looks set to return to Real Madrid this summer.
Vinicius believes that nobody reads the game or a group of players as well as the former Chelsea, Manchester United and Inter Milan boss.
“With group management, with knowing how to win, with understanding the game like nobody else, Jose Mourinho. We’d go into a game and he’d say ‘This is going to happen, this is going to happen, this is going to happen for the positive, and this is going to happen for the negative’. Then the game would unfold and you’d already know it,” explained the striker in a long interview about his career with Globo Esporte, translated by Sport Witness.
“To me, he’s the one I respect the most. I realised it’s not only because of the titles, but because of the person, the way he leads, the way he is. For me, Mourinho is top. The greatest of all.”
The Brazilian explained how the Portuguese caught him off guard when he video-called to convince him to make the move to Tottenham during that transfer window.
“When they told me Mourinho was going to call me, I thought it was nonsense. Then he called me on FaceTime. I looked at the screen and though ‘No way’,” said Vinicius before remembering the manager’s first words.
“He asked me how I was and then said ‘look, don’t come here wearing flip-flops because it’s cold here!’. I imagined the angry Mourinho. The Mourinho we see from the outside.
“He started sending me messages. Like any other member of the club. Like a coordinator. Then I arrived and he would talk to me. Sometimes I thought ‘My God, is this really the real Mourinho?'”
FOLLOW OUR TOTTENHAM FB PAGE! Latest Spurs news, analysis and much more via our dedicated Facebook page
Vinicius soon discovered what it took to get accepted into Mourinho’s trusted circle of players even if the Spurs manager’s unusual style confused him at first.
Having expected to be training with the starting players, the attacker initially found himself in his early weeks working with the fringe players who would not be involved in the next game.
“I arrived and two weeks pass, and he puts me to train with players who weren’t going to play and I didn’t understand anything,” he said. “I was training, training, training. I even joked with Willian, who was at Chelsea and knows his little tricks.
“He would come with his hand in his jacket pocket, passing by and saying ‘you’re training very well, keep it up’. Training? He has to put me with 20, 22 players in the game, right? And I went to the assistants to find out what I did wrong. I thought I was dead.
“They said ‘just keep working, just keep going’. I spent a week and a half like that, in the corner. Then he came to me and said ‘You did not stop working. Now I’ve seen you’re one of mine. I can count on you’. He was testing me. Those are things that are very difficult to explain and very difficult to learn on coaching courses.”
Vinicius was at Tottenham during a period when Spurs had some top attacking options in Harry Kane, Son Heung-min and Gareth Bale, as well as his compatriot Lucas Moura, but it was Kane who dazzled him the most.
“The one who really caught my attention was Harry Kane, because that’s the maximum level,” he said. “One thing that really caught my attention about Harry Kane was that he’d score a hat-trick and the next morning nothing had changed. He’d just continue with his training. He’s one of the most complete players I’ve ever seen.
“I’d even say a lot of people don’t understand what Harry Kane really is. He’s at an absurd level. Everything you can talk about when it comes to football, Harry Kane has it.”
