It was supposed to be Jose Mourinho’s triumphant return to the Nou Camp. Instead he had his very own Black Monday — a 5-0 defeat against Pep Guardiola, the biggest and bitterest of his career in front of an estimated global audience of 400 million.
As he prepares for his first Manchester derby on Saturday he will doubtless cast his mind back to the first La Liga meeting between the two men six years ago. No one expects Guardiola v Mourinho Premier League Round One to go the same way, but then nobody expected it on November 29, 2010 either.
‘The 5-0 was the best game I have ever played in,’ Xavi Hernandez told Sportsmail. ‘There are more important games, like the World Cup final, but the feeling of superiority was incredible — it is one thing to have it against another team but against Real Madrid? They hardly touched the ball. We gave ourselves a minute’s round of applause in the dressing room afterwards.’
Mercifully for Madrid there is enough distance between the home and away dressing rooms at the Nou Camp for the noise from that ovation never to have reached the Madrid players, who showered and changed in silence, save for a few recriminations about the way they had approached the game.
Some of Mourinho’s troops felt they had shown Barcelona too much respect. Just four months earlier, players such as Iker Casillas, Sergio Ramos, Xabi Alonso and Alvaro Arbeloa had won the World Cup alongside the likes of Xavi and David Villa. Yet there was a feeling that while Guardiola had set Barca up to beat Madrid, Mourinho had concentrated on not being beaten — a plan rendered useless inside the first 20 minutes following goals from Xavi and Pedro.
David Villa took over in the second half, adding the third and fourth, tormenting Ramos, who was sent off late on. By then Jeffren had come off the bench to add a fifth.
‘It was one of the best and most emotionally charged nights of my time at Barcelona,’ Villa, who is now at Manchester City’s American franchise New York City FC, told Sportsmail this week.
‘When you play that well you always enjoy it. If you win it’s even better, and if you win against your greatest rival then it’s no surprise you could see just how much we were enjoying it out on the pitch.’
The Monday night kick-off had made the fixture the only show in town across Europe and Barca’s performance had even been enjoyed by a man who will be very much on Mourinho’s side on Saturday.
Wayne Rooney had risen from his couch and given Guardiola’s team a standing ovation in his living room. Back in Barcelona the game had been on pay-per-view television.
That meant that bars that would have been empty on any other wet Monday night in November had been fully booked two weeks in advance, such was the demand. Those bars emptied and the streets filled on the final whistle.
Rooney will have enjoyed Villa’s goals, the first from a sublime pass from Lionel Messi, who incredibly didn’t score that night.
‘The second of the two is my favourite,’ Villa says. ‘It starts with me making a run that begins in my own half, so the physical demands at that stage of the game were huge.’
He was substituted on 75 minutes but had no complaints. ‘My work was done,’ he says. ‘The stadium applauded me and I can remember just feeling very happy.’
The 5-0 scoreline had special significance for Barcelona fans because two of the greatest nights in the club’s history ended with the same result. In 1974 a Johan Cruyff-inspired Barca had beaten Madrid 5-0 on the way to their first title in 14 years.
And with Cruyff as the manager his ‘Dream Team’ repeated the scoreline in 1994.
Carles Rexach, who had played in 1974 and formed part of Cruyff’s coaching staff in 1994, said: ‘This was better than the Dream Team’s 5-0. I’ve never seen a team so brutally superior to the opposition.’
And it wasn’t just any opposition. It was Mourinho’s Madrid. Mourinho (below), who as Chelsea manager had insinuated that going to the Nou Camp was like a night at the theatre for the club’s oh-so- quiet supporters.
‘It’s true that it can be a quiet stadium,’ says Catalan journalist and ghost writer of Andres Iniesta’s autobiography, The Artist, Marcos Lopez. ‘Mourinho was actually able to do something few manage — get the Barca fans to sing a song.’
The song in question was ‘Sal del banquillo, Mou-rinho sal del banquillo,’ a call for him to come out of the dug-out and into the technical area. Usually it’s his domain but for most of the night it was just an empty space as his team fell apart before his eyes.
He described the defeat as the biggest of his career after the game but said: ‘It’s not difficult to take because we had no chance of winning. It’s not a defeat where we didn’t deserve to lose or because the referee has influenced the result. One team played to their maximum potential and the other played very badly. It’s a deserved victory and a deserved defeat.’
Some accused Mourinho of negative tactics. Mesut Ozil was replaced by Lassana Diarra at half-time and Arbeloa replaced Marcelo. They were defensive changes but the defeat might have been even greater had he not made them. ‘Some of the local journalists who remember the 5-0s of ’74 and ’94 suspected the players had stopped at five deliberately so the scoreline would be a homage to the other two famous victories,’ says Lopez.
Mourinho never forgot the defeat and it influenced a raft of decisions he would take over the coming months. Exasperated by the displays of Karim Benzema, he demanded another striker be signed and Emmanuel Adebayor arrived in January on loan.
And when sporting director Jorge Valdano opposed the signing of another forward, Mourinho banned him from the training ground and team flights, before delivering a ‘him-or-me’ ultimatum that saw Valdano fired after the season.
But all was not lost in his titanic struggle with Guardiola. He won a Clasico Spanish Cup final the following April when his Real Madrid beat Barcelona 1-0.
He will be hoping for a repeat on Saturday, and that his first meeting with Guardiola in England is in no way similar to their first fixture in Spain.
Daily Mail