Imminence of the sack above Jose Mourinho’s head is dark, immense – and wildly entertaining

Osman Samiuddin writes of the delicious schadenfreude in Jose Mourinho's seeming last days at Chelsea, as well as the morbid draw of any manager's downfall.

Chelsea manager Jose Mourinho shown during a press conference on Friday at the club's training ground. Tony O'Brien / Action Images / Reuters / December 11, 2015

There comes a tide in the affairs of football managers when absolutely nothing is in their control.

If, of course, you go by the words of a club owner to Brian Clough — “First there’s the chairman, then there’s the directors, then there’s the fans and the players, and then, bottom of the pile, there’s the ... manager” — then nothing, or very little, is ever really in their control.

Or, if you are that way inclined, you might put stock by the counterintuitive findings of Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski: in their book “Soccernomics” they argue that the impact of managers is generally overstated. The right players, the right squad and the right support team around the manager is, more often than not, enough.

Read more: Greg Lea why Diego Simeone would be the perfect replacement for Jose Mourinho at Chelsea

But let us humour ourselves for now and argue that Clough was unique and that was a time long gone, and that men such as Alex Ferguson and Arsene Wenger and Pep Guardiola must have some impact on their sides. So too must they have some control.

But the moment when they lose it? When it comes to be that the unbreakable logic of each bad result is only that there must be a worse result to follow and a disastrous result to follow that?

When players’ unhappiness begins to manifest itself in myriad ways? When chairmen and chief executives suddenly go quiet? When fans’ songs first sting and then become funny because, well, that is the way of gallows humour?

When former players or those in the media — and usually, today, that is one and the same thing — pretend to ask, but are actually delivering a verdict: “Surely so-and-so cannot survive this result can he?” Or “Can you see him surviving to the end of January?”

This is a dark and wild hour, but it is also an irresistible one, pulling us all in with the same force with which a lynch mob sucks people in. Boots first, fists to follow, then release, as if a fever has just been broken.

How can one not enjoy the days before a manager is about to be sacked?

Such is the roiling in the world of Jose Mourinho currently. It is OK to admit to yourself that Mourinho being the manager about to get the sack intensifies the pleasures of the ritual a thousand times over.

It is not just the schadenfreude of watching a prickly, abrasive and sure, widely disliked, man fall. That plays a part, but really it is the overwhelming drama, the immenseness of the spectacle that comes with everything Mourinho.

The players have “betrayed” him. Not let him down, or had a few off days, no sir: this was a betrayal, he scowle – and nobody scowls quite like Mourinho. He casts doubts on their injuries. He manages to rub them up so much the wrong way that they publicly attempt throwing bibs at him.

It is such rich and dark comedy, the sincere hope is that he does not go yet and instead the affair is dragged out through the rest of the season. Although imagine the fun once he is gone, of the details that will come out of how the dressing room has been this season?

But it says something about the power of such moments that it does not even need as combustible a presence as Mourinho to bring out what is, war and reality shows aside, pretty much the worst instincts of humanity.

Even a man as anodyne as David Moyes, during his last months as manager of Manchester United, managed to arouse some primal emotion around him as he toppled over and fell.

Ultimately, he was not just ill-equipped but was an affront to the whole idea of Manchester United. How dare he think himself fit to manage them?

Sometimes it is not the manager as much as the misfortunes of the club that light this spark. United are one, in a way that it is difficult to see Barcelona being.

Come to think of it, the way this season is going, with a man such as Louis van Gaal in charge, the situation is ripe. Just as with Real Madrid and Rafa Benitez, if a culling will come, it will come loud and with violence.

We can only wait in anticipation.

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