Lampard scrubbed up nicely for Chelsea after Jose showered him with praise



Frank Lampard was standing in the shower after a training session when Jose Mourinho told him he was the best player in the world. Casually, but with certainty, as if he was imparting information that any coach could have worked out.

That is what he does. That is why today is the seventh anniversary of the last league match he lost at home. February 23, 2002, Porto 2 Beira-Mar 3.

Brothers in arms: Frank Lampard and his then Chelsea boss Jose Mourinho embrace in 2005

Since then, he has stayed undefeated in 38 league games at Porto, 60 at Chelsea and 12 more at Inter Milan, who now dominate Serie A. Mourinho is currently getting world class performances from Adriano, a notorious waster, and Sulley Muntari, a Ghana international who was good at Portsmouth, but not this good.

Mourinho’s brilliance is the way he can take a top player and elevate him. John Terry and Didier Drogba have never looked better than under his stewardship. Deco, at Porto, was the coach’s creation. Zlatan Ibrahimovic is in the form of his life in Italy.

The techniques Mourinho uses to manipulate situations publicly, he utilises in private, too. He knows precisely when to drop the bomb, which is how, at Chelsea, he turned Lampard from a very good player into the driving force behind back-to-back title wins and a Footballer of the Year.

‘His man management was just terrific,’ said Lampard. ‘He knew how to get into people’s heads. He got into mine the moment he came. He has that air of arrogance, that confidence, and it rubs off.

‘I have never had a manager who, while I’m standing in the shower cleaning my balls, tells me I’m the best player in the world. He did that. I’ll never forget it. So casual. “You’re the best player in the world, but you need to win titles”.

‘From that moment the extra confidence was in me. Not that I thought I was the best player in the world, but the manager who had just won the Champions League thought it. So I went out a different player.’

That is the key to Mourinho. What you see is not the half of it. The cleverness of the man is what happens behind closed doors. ‘His training sessions were to the dot,’ added Lampard. ‘He was so organised. There was always a point to what he was doing; and his man management was the same.’

Manchester United have their work cut out this week, particularly without Nemanja Vidic. No team have retained the Champions League and the previous four

winners have been knocked out in the last 16 the following year, by opposition considerably inferior to Mourinho’s Inter Milan.

Flying: Zlatan Ibrahimovic is going great at Inter Milan

Twickenham is on the Football Association’s list as a potential venue for the 2018 World Cup. Why? Can’t another sport have something good without football wishing to colonise it?

After defeating Bologna on Saturday, Mourinho said he would arrive at the training ground this week with a positive message for his players about tomorow’s match.

He has already told Ibrahimovic he is a better player than Cristiano Ronaldo. Maybe he was scrubbing down at the time, too.

Maybe, if Mourinho’s inspirational powers remain, by the end of the season his players will have something almost as precious to clean: as Inter’s first European champions since 1965.

If that happens, just call him Goldenballs.



Not far-Fletched

Darren Fletcher ahead of Xabi Alonso: well, that caused a bit of fuss, didn’t it?

In a column last week I made a fairly uncontroversial observation that Manchester United were ahead of Liverpool because they had better players.

The thrust was that while people look to peripheral reasons such as Rafael Benitez’s verbal attack on Sir Alex Ferguson, or his disagreements with the board at Liverpool as the reason his title charge has lost momentum, the explanation is much simpler: United have the best team.

To support the argument, I asked how many Liverpool players would get in United’s XI and guessed between two and four. Then I listed my composite team — and the fun started.

How, it was asked by many people, including this newspaper’s irate golf correspondent, could I put Fletcher in and not Alonso (or Michael Carrick or Javier Mascherano)? So here goes.

Mr Reliable: Darren Fletcher holds off Everton's Marouane Fellaini

I wanted my composite XI to work. I didn’t want to pick one of those teams with a line of beautiful midfield players in a row and nobody to win a tackle. To find room for Cristiano Ronaldo, Wayne Rooney and Fernando Torres up front I had to play three in midfield and I had already listed Steven Gerrard and Ryan Giggs.

Cheer up, Harry. Everything will be OK... Tottenham Hotspur manager Harry Redknapp (left) is angry about a congested fixture list that has his team playing six times in 17 days. Not to worry. Wait until next year: it will clear right out.

Carrick was the first name down, but his strength is not breaking up the play. Alonso would have been next, but is similar to Carrick.

So it was a choice between Mascherano and Fletcher and Mascherano is not playing as well as last season. Fletcher, meanwhile, has been immense in several key matches for United, not least against Chelsea at Old Trafford.

So I stand by it. Sorry Derek; sorry all. Alonso is having an excellent season but, like Sir Alex, I picked Fletcher to get a job done.

And by the way, out of 26 games in which he has featured this season, do you know how many Manchester United have lost? One: to Zenit St Petersburg in the European Super Cup, a match the club took less than seriously. Not bad for a ‘donkey’.

Platini plan is off limits

Michel Platini, president of UEFA, lobbied the European Union last week with his proposals for limits on transfer spending.

He wants expenditure on transfers and wages to be capped at 60 per cent of revenue, a measure that would cement the status quo of elite club domination with no parvenu interlopers, just as it does in France, where Lyon are closing in on an eighth straight league title, thanks to the regulations Platini proposes.

Rendez-vous: Platini meets European Parliament president Hans-Gert Poettering (left)

By doing this, and by enforcing stringent rules on debt, Platini also hopes to reduce the strength of English clubs in Europe. He never acknowledges that many Barclays Premier League clubs are in debt because of stadium rebuilds, while rivals on the Continent receive government assistance for similar projects.

What a performance, Andy

Andy Flower, senior coach to the England cricket team on the tour of the Caribbean, says he wants to be considered for the post of performance director when it is advertised by the ECB.

He also says it was batsman Owais Shah’s decision to insert James Anderson as night watchman in the third Test in Antigua, a call that may have cost England the match. That was the time for Flower to direct performance. It is too late doing it on an application form.



Nantes, for instance, where club president Waldemar Kita (who is Polish, so foreign ownership is clearly not an English preserve as some at UEFA would have us believe), has announced plans to build a new stadium with a view to it being used in the 2016 European Championship.

The winner of that bidding process is not announced until May 2010 but no matter, because the city council will be picking up a large part of the tab. Indeed, the project is now being evaluated by the sports rights agency SPORTFIVE, where the son of a certain UEFA president is employed.

So that’s the way to do it.

Only a crony, PleasedMan

Looking at the way Lord Pleasedman* of the Football Association has snapped up politicians for top jobs at Soho Square, one would think Great Britain is the best-run country in the world.

That the National Health Service is not the adventure in misdiagnosis, incompetence and hospital bugs it has been for two members of my family this year; that the education system is not turning out 13-year-old fathers and the worst teenage pregnancy rate in Europe; that unemployment is not rising exponentially; that foreign policy isn’t a war of attrition in the Middle East and the City is not a crumbling ruin of failing banks propped up by money the Government doesn’t really have.

Friends reunited: Lord PleasedMan (left, obviously) and Ian Watmore



Having stuffed his World Cup bid committee full of Westminster’s finest, PleasedMan has now appointed a Government ally, Ian Watmore, as FA chief executive. In this way, the FA chairman resembles a tired old football manager with no fresh ideas other than to keep going back to his former club for players. Fine, if that club was Manchester United. Not so good if it is Kettering Town.

*Now some of you may know him as Lord Triesman but, as I have never seen a man look quite so pleased with himself and his status, in this column, Lord PleasedMan he shall remain.



Top man: Ebbsfleet chief executive David Davis

Dream Ebbs away

Ebbsfleet United thought they had 32,000 loyal fans. They didn’t. They had 32,000 part-timers subscribing to MyFootballClub.co.uk and playing a computer game that got boring after a while, as all computer games do.

Now, Ebbsfleet are running short of membership renewals and funds. Will Brooks, mastermind of MyFootballClub, was marketing a gimmick, not a brave new world.

Gimmicks have a shelf life. Game over.

Caught out: Christine Ohuruogu celebrates glory in Osaka after serving her ban

What a load of dopes

Christine Ohuruogu wrote a column in a national newspaper last week that, at first glance, appeared admirably to be in support of the whereabouts system of random drug testing. But on closer inspection it was just another dollop of self-serving twaddle about how tough it is to report for work at a set time every day and how, only now, are other sports beginning to realise this.

Andrew Murray is livid, apparently. A member of Great Britain’s rowing team says she is on the verge of giving her sport up.

Please do. All of you.

An amoral maze



The pathetic Women’s Tennis Association fined the Dubai Championships £208,000 for their refusal to admit Shahar Peer, the Israeli tennis player, to this season’s tournament.

The WTA boasted that this was a record punishment, but you could stand next to a Dubai oil well with a polystyrene cup and collect that much in spillage in a day.

No qualms: Venus Williams was proud to win the Dubai WTA Tennis Championships

Worse was the reaction of finalist Venus Williams. Asked why players did not boycott the event after Peer was barred on the grounds of nationality, Williams said there was a bigger picture to consider.

Which was? ‘We can’t let our sponsors down,’ she replied.

All about priorities, isn’t it? Despicable.

See if we care.

Olympics idea well below par



A detailed proposal for golf’s inclusion as an Olympic event has been sent by the International Golf Federation to the International Olympic Committee. The sport will now be considered for the 2016 Games, alongside baseball, karate, roller-skating, rugby sevens, softball and squash. The evaluation process should be simple: would winning a gold medal be the pinnacle in your sport?

No? Well, go away. Golf’s out.

Among friends: David Beckham on duty with England in Spain

If you want my advice, Beckham

Matthew Etherington went to Stoke City for more than AC Milan have bid for David Beckham.

Even so, Beckham made a huge mistake signing for LA Galaxy and we wish him well in his attempt to finesse a move to Italy.

His career adviser, Simon Fuller, has flown to America to broker the deal. As he must have been the guy who steered him down this path in the first place, what is wrong with this picture?

