Three semi-finals, three walls
Pepe sent off against Barcelona in 2011. Sergio Ramos ballooning his penalty over the bar against Bayern in 2012. Robert Lewandowski putting four past Madrid for Dortmund in 2013.
Three springs. Three exits at the same stage. That is what Jose Mourinho left behind the first time he walked out of the Bernabeu.
He had arrived with two Champions League trophies already, one from Porto and one from Inter. Florentino Perez still tells anyone who asks that Mourinho laid the groundwork for the six European titles the club has collected since. Not much of a consolation for a man who wanted his own.
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“The current situation has absolutely nothing to do with the past”
Back in the job this summer, the 63-year-old Portuguese got the ghosts question at Monday’s press conference. He was not interested.
“I was at Real Madrid twice. I left the club in 2013; we won what we won, we lost what we lost. We gave everything. And the current situation has absolutely nothing to do with the past. In 2010, we had not reached the quarter-finals, and we had not played in a semi-final for years.”
No comparisons, then. The appetite, on the other hand, he makes no effort to hide.
153 games, 80 wins, and one thing nobody has managed
The record backs him up. He has coached 153 matches in the competition and won 80 of them, fifth on the all-time list for experience, in a bracket occupied by Carlo Ancelotti and Pep Guardiola. Nobody in this season’s field has spent longer in the tournament.
Then there is the actual prize, the one that has nothing to do with Madrid. Win it this year and Mourinho becomes the first manager to lift the Champions League with three different clubs. For now he sits in the group who have done it with two, next to Ancelotti, Guardiola and Ottmar Hitzfeld.
Seventeen years on from Inter. With a squad coming off a season without a trophy, and a Kylian Mbappe who still has not won one of these.
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