José Mourinho adopts grouchy and petulantly defensive postures so often in his working routine – as he did again on Saturday – that it is easy to forget it is usually only an act. Asked to speak publicly on a matter of some importance on Friday, the Chelsea manager was eloquent and reasonable.
He said he had been ashamed to watch the now notorious footage of Chelsea supporters humiliating a black commuter in a Paris Métro station, disgusted even, but promised the club would take appropriate action and work hard to re-establish its good name. “These people do not represent the club,” Mourinho said. “I am a proud Chelsea manager because I know what this club is. I left in 2007 and couldn’t wait to be back, and it is not because of people like this.”
Chelsea have also acted quickly and firmly, not only threatening life bans but wasting no time in identifying and suspending suspected culprits. The victim, Souleymane Sylla, was invited to attend the return fixture against PSG at Stamford Bridge as a guest of the home side. While that understandably seems to have proved awkward to accept for a man initially too stunned to explain to his own family what had happened on the train, at least it was a gesture of goodwill made for the right reasons.
Cynics may suggest those reasons include repairing Chelsea’s tarnished image to keep the money coming in from sponsors and commercial deals, while the prospect of Souleymane visiting Stamford Bridge inevitably led to speculation over whether he would be introduced to John Terry or kept well away from the club captain.
Chelsea are far from universally popular; neutrals find it easy to dislike them for a number of reasons, some of them entirely valid. Yet it is too easy to mock, just as it is too simplistic to judge a whole club and their supporters on the basis of what Terry said to Anton Ferdinand in 2011. It is not safe to assume that only Chelsea fans could have been responsible for the depressing events in Paris; other clubs have their share of obnoxious, over-entitled followers and it is equally dangerous to imagine that the vast majority of the club’s supporters would have been anything other than horrified when confronted with evidence of how a few chose to behave when visiting another country.
The ugly fact of English boorishness abroad is what has been exposed here, hardly for the first time, and, with an irony that will go over the heads of most of the morons on the train, it falls to Mourinho, a foreigner working at a club owned by a foreigner, to explain to the world that most English people are not really like that. Fortunately, he is making a good job of it. “I imagine myself in that same situation,” he said. “I cannot go home. It is a humiliation. It is difficult to believe this can happen in modern times but the reality is that it has.”
Too true. Nothing can change that now but Chelsea are not trying to hide, they are trying to do something about it.
