José Mourinho goes to greet Manuel Pellegrini after the defeat suffered by Roma against Betis. /
Opinion
Soccer is lavish in one of the oldest human practices, the revenge
Eurobetis gave the bell in Rome and endorsed Mourinho’s team 1-2 in a Europa League match. The Betis players brightened the day of the nearly 5,000 fans who traveled to Italy, but they especially had their coach in mind. With Mourinho in the middle, no one is surprised that more than three points are at stake in a football match. Because the cordial initial greetings between the two coaches did not hide the open wound that Mourinho left years ago when he despised Pellegrini.
In March 2011, a journalist asked Mourinho if he was afraid of suffering the same fate as his predecessor in office, Manuel Pellegrini. Mou answered unceremoniously: “If Madrid kicks me out I’m not going to train Malaga, I’ll go to a big club in England or Italy, not Malaga.” The Chilean coach had landed there, which the ‘Special One’ considered a step backwards, unbecoming of his stature.
The always polite and patient Pellegrini kept it for more than eleven years. And so, in an interview granted to ‘La Gazzetta dello Sport’ the day before Roma-Betis, he praised Mou for his maturity: he had understood that courage and success are not measured only by what is achieved in the elite, but also for the courage to face new challenges and obtain results adjusted to the possibilities: «Now Mourinho also lives for challenges, such as taking Roma to the Champions League or winning the Conference League».
Pellegrini did not bite his tongue this time. He stressed that Mourinho had gone wrong in the last clubs where he had led projects that did not bear the expected fruit. And, pulling irony, he celebrated that, more than a decade later, Mou had realized that, by choosing to train Roma, the Portuguese coach was showing maturity (perhaps the one he did not have when he allowed himself to despise his colleague from profession).
Football is a privileged context where players and coaches stage some of the most basic values, which the people have summed up in brief aphorisms: ‘Where they give it, they take it’ or ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth’. In the Great Theater of Soccer, as in life, the outrages are paid, sooner or later. It is more: the restoration of the balance demands to be compensated with a humiliation of the same caliber.
It is an unwritten but ancient and universal rule. In some African tribes, what is known as ‘blood revenge’ rules. If an individual is killed, the leaders of the murderer’s tribe take care of the punishment: they hand him over or execute him themselves. They act in this way following a worldview based on reciprocity and order: only an equivalent death can restore the balance.
As a civilized substitute for our most archaic impulses, football exhibits more elegant forms of ‘vendetta’, without the blood reaching the river. Pellegrini saw that his team was ready, motivated him suitably and decided that the time had come. In the previous one he returned the taunt to his offender and in the match his team came back from a goal against and scored two goals that Mourinho must have experienced as two slaps from the ‘Engineer’.
We must thank Mourinho for his contribution to the spectacle of football. Because he’s left so many dead in the closet, every team that goes up against him seems to have scores to settle. In the 17th century, foreigners who visited the Iberian Peninsula said that the most widespread custom around here was “throwing taunts and chufletas” and that there was no Iberian who did not reciprocate an offense in unique ways. We Spaniards brought to America our conception of honor and the ways in which our disputes should be settled: waiting for your moment to deal the repairing blow, with a mixture of sharp tongue and symbolic slap. No fists.
Of course, the Chilean coach learned this on Iberian soil, perhaps in Malaga. “God compensates”, I heard him say years ago, alluding to how he would not have had the opportunity to train the best Malaga in its history, if they had not kicked him in Madrid. I don’t know if divine justice exists, but earthly justice was fulfilled on Thursday at the Olympic Stadium in Rome. Sorry, Mou: ‘Occhio per occhio, dente per dente’.
