José Mourinho v Sean Dyche: only one winner in Ashley Barnes debate
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Version 0 of 1. A couple of managers have earned the title of Ginger Mourinho over the years. There was, to say the least, a hint of sarcasm about Bolton fans referring to Gary Megson that way, but when Burnley supporters gave Sean Dyche the moniker, there was no such insincerity. For Dyche has performed minor miracles at Turf Moor, taking a side who many pegged for relegation from the second tier into the Premier League. And now, after a summer of transfer business that looked more like he was beefing up his bench for the 2015-16 Championship season, he is making a very decent fist of surviving in the top flight too. Thus, the concept of an auburn version of a super-famous manager is accurate enough. Of course, in reality, it is an uneasy comparison for Dyche, as the behaviour of the two men this week has shown. Mourinho’s paranoia seemed to reach fever pitch when he revealed the “four moments” from the 1-1 draw between Chelsea and Burnley, his hump filled to the brim like some sort of injustice camel. The Portuguese stopped just short of putting two pencils up his nose and a pair of pants on his head to wibble his way through a “surprise” Goals On Sunday appearance at the weekend. Mourinho, using his impromptu appointment with Ben Shepherd and Chris Kamara to repeat the contention that there’s a “campaign” against Chelsea by forces who wish him and his club ill for reasons unclear, is approaching the realm of a 9/11 truther, that curious corner of society who spend their time poring over footage trying to prove it was a pair of military planes crashing into the World Trade Center rather than commercial ones. By contrast Dyche, in a manner that seemed appropriate given the respective resources available to the two managers, responded to Mourinho popping up on the biggest sports broadcaster in Christendom by recording an interview for the Burnley website, on what looks like a camcorder they just had lying around the office. Dyche, who received more probing questions from the in-house Burnley TV inquisitor than Mourinho did from the wide-eyed and baffled Kamara and Shepherd, calmly and sensibly dissected the four points of contention Mourinho railed against. He conceded that his side were probably lucky to get away with the handball against Michael Kightly but also pointed out that, for all the post-hoc complaints about Ashley Barnes’ horrible-looking shin-high follow-through on Nemanja Matic, the only person in the ground to react to it with anything other than shrugging indifference at the time was Matic himself, the footage rather handily showing Mourinho himself remaining unmoved until the big Serb exacted his shoving revenge. Of course, it wasn’t completely objective, and his assessment of Barnes’ first “challenge” on Branislav Ivanovic – which seemed to carry much more malign intent than the studs to Matic’s shins – as being “at worst a yellow card” was at best generous to his player. Additionally, you would imagine that if the push by Jason Shackell that sent Diego Costa to the turf (memorably described by Paul Doyle as “hardly the sort of shove that would, for example, prevent a commuter from boarding a train”) was on Danny Ings, Dyche’s verdict would’ve been a little stronger than “it’s a real debate point”. The difference was that Dyche, with his demeanour like an avuncular Wetherspoons bouncer who would politely advise you to put that drunk mate in a taxi while a colleague toyed with the knuckle-duster in his pocket, spoke cogently and rationally. He is aware that there is a world beyond his, that it’s possible for some people to make honest mistakes and not under the impression that the world cares enough about him to arrange a conspiracy. Perhaps the one big problem with Mourinho’s attitude and comments is that the strength of his self-regard seems to be such that, when one of his opinions falls from his mouth, it is immediately crystallised as fact, therefore begetting the remainder of his conspiracy theory. Mourinho’s opinion is that Barnes should have been sent off, thus Mourinho (and, as a minor corollary Chelsea) have been wronged just like all those other times. “Infamy! Infamy! They’ve all got it in for me!” Simple facts, laid out before him; in his mind, Mourinho’s appraisal probably seems as rational and sensible as Dyche’s does to the rest of us. Of course, Mourinho is unlikely to care about all of this, and it is impossible to argue that his methods do not work. One wonders if it will even register, but Dyche displayed that, just because you are a Premier League manager under a great deal of pressure, it is possible to be relatively sensible and objective about games involving your team. Obviously most managers are one-eyed to some degree, absorbed as they are by their own success or otherwise, but there is still room to view incidents like a normal, sentient being. Only one manager reacted with balance at the weekend, and it was not the bloke chatting with Kammy and Shep. Dyche is about as far from being a Ginger Mourinho as you can get. |