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Football has not been allowed to stay the same ever since a day ten years ago when Jose Mourinho announced the arrival of ‘The Special One’ by charging down the touchline in celebration of a Porto goal in the Champions League, and he was at it again in the post-match conference after Chelsea managed a 2-0 victory over Leicester City, who had initially rattled the London club with a gutsy first half performance.
Mourinho does not find any reason to complain about his team’s league standing as of now, but still breathed fire in the media meet which should have been a relatively relaxed affair. He has called for time-outs to be instated into football, and has called for managers be given the power to call time on a match once in both halves each.
If his revolutionary directions are followed, football coaches will get a larger role of infringing on the action even more profoundly than they already do. In sports such as basketball where this provision is present, coaches generally use time-outs at strategically important points in the match, and one can predict Mourinho himself will be a master at using the hypothetical rule to his advantage.
“Football is very slow to change the rules. How many years have we had to wait for goal-line technology, for the third substitution? I hope I am still in football when they give the coach the chance to stop the game during the first-half once and during the second-half, because you can make the game much better. Imagine today. I would have stopped the game in the 10th minute. It would be interesting. [Louis] van Gaal in the World Cup, the ref stopped the game for the water break, and he changed the system of his team and managed to win the game.”
Possibilities of the Rule Being Introduced
It shall be interesting if other coaches like Van Gaal join in on this clamour for increased managerial participation. Some coaches will surely disagree though, thinking such arbitrarily decided time-outs will interrupt the free flow of football and can be misused rampantly by teams wanting to slow the action down. The provision for a third substitute and goal-line technology, the examples Mourinho provides, cannot be misused under any circumstances.
This is not the first time the iconic Chelsea boss has come up with a pet theory on how to re-model the game, and it is likely the latest he is to have aired will ruffle a few feathers and not raise his stock among the game’s administrators. Going by initial reactions, the social media is not too taken with the idea either.
