John Terry has revealed one of Jose Mourinho’s ingenious escape routes at Chelsea and how he would ‘kill’ Tottenham.
Terry played under Mourinho in his two spells at Stamford Bridge, winning trophy after trophy as they took the London side to the top of the game.
Mourinho became one of football’s elite managers with different methods, including an incredible defensive record which saw the Blues concede just 15 Premier League goals in his debut season.
He was also a master at his dealings with the media and opposition leaders, as he continually caused mind games in the headlines.
Roma boss Mourinho was, and still is, notorious for the pressure he can put on referees, and Terry has now revealed a trick that left an official checking his rule book.
Asked what Mourinho wanted more than anything else, Terry replied: “Just to win. Simple. No matter how, would do anything to get a little edge or whatever.
“I remember, the rule was if you were one and the ball was delivered into the box and two defenders went up together and both fell to the ground after you didn’t have to go out of play.
“So for the last ten or fifteen minutes when that happened, he used to sit down, me and Gary Cahill, and say ‘when the ball comes in the box, make sure that you both go down so that you bump into each other and you both go down as you can ‘don’t come loose’.
“We’re going ‘we’ve never heard of this rule’, so the ball goes, we win 1-0, the last ten minutes, the header goes away, Gaz falls and I’m like ‘I better go low’ so I dropped to the ground and got up and the ref said ‘you two off the pitch’ and I said ‘no that’s not the rule, check with the linesman’ ‘ yeah you’re right, you both stay ‘
“Mourinho was so far ahead with those little bits and you talk about little margins and the best managers find those little little margins. Unbelievable.”
That defensive solidity embodied in the partnership of Terry and Cahill, with Mourinho not known for attacking football until his side Real Madrid broke the La Liga goalscoring record in 2012.
However, there were some weird exceptions at Chelsea, as Terry revealed.
“[We] didn’t need it [to score lots of goals]but there were times when we played where he asked,” the former centre-back said.
“If there were two or three of us at half-time he would demand certain teams, Spurs being one of them, he would say ‘go kill them, go make them suffer today, do if five, six, seven, eight, let them really suffer, let them know that Chelsea are there”.
“Always as players on the pitch we were saying ‘no, we’ll take that’, I was on a clean sheet bonus so I’m fine!”
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