Mourinho achieves Inter minimum in first season

When Jose Mourinho arrived at Inter Milan amongst much pomp and fanfare in June last year he was set a definite target – win the Champions League.

Inter were on a run of three straight titles, in no small part thanks to the match-fixing punishment that sent Juventus down to Serie B, and two of their best players into Inter’s colours.

Back then, in the summer of 2006, Inter were known as the country’s perennial underachievers and chokers.

But they romped to the 2007 title more by default as points penalties dealt out to AC Milan, Fiorentina and Lazio had robbed Inter of any meaningful challengers.

For a team that had gone 17 years without a title the goodwill afforded Mourinho’s predecessor Roberto Mancini for landing that first scudetto in a generation did not last long and despite guiding the nerazzurri to three Serie A crowns in a row, he was dismissed just days after the end of last season.

The official explanation given was Inter’s continuing failure in Europe.

Reading between the lines, it was clear that Mourinho’s brief was success in Europe as well as at home.

His minimal aim, of course, was to retain the title that Inter have now owned for four years in a row.

And while he will be given some credit for that, there is also the feeling that he has done nothing more than his predecessor.

Of course, it has been his first season in Italy and his team had the misfortune of being drawn against holders Manchester United in the second round of the Champions League.

There is no shame in losing to United — who have since gone on to reach a second straight final — and the English team’s strength was taken into consideration when judging the Italian league novice Mourinho.

But next season he will be playing by different rules.

His honeymoon period will be over and he will be expected to deliver, for president Massimo Moratti is known to not be a patient man when it comes to coaches.

In the meantime, Mourinho has been everything the English had come to expect of him during just over three years in the Premier League.

His team started the season in efficient if unspectacular style, never drifting far from the Serie A summit and usually dominating it.

Mourinho himself has been up to all his old tricks, grating on opposition coaches, winding up the media and doing things ‘his way’.

Early on he enraged the country’s football writers by sending his assistant coach Giuseppe Baresi to the post-match press conferences, an action that saw him accused of lacking respct.

In typically Mourinho style he stretched the patience of the media at every possible turn, telling them he preferred their English counterparts while also claiming football and refereeing in England were superior.

It was all part of the Mourinho siege tactic, provoking animosity from without to foster greater togetherness within.

He didn’t just challenge the media, he also picked fights with his fellow coaches, most notably Juventus boss Claudio Ranieri, with whom he sustained a running battle in which Ranieri usually appeared to be an unwilling combatant.

Mourinho used the pair’s history — Ranieri was Mourinho’s predecessor at Chelsea — to stoke up ill-feeling, regularly comparing Ranieri’s record as a coach and a linguist unfavourably to his own prowesses.

When he couldn’t think of anything to throw at Ranieri, he generally bragged about his superiority to Mancini.

But for him to prove that, he will have to take Inter to the business end in Europe next season.

However, with a fifth league title in a third different country over seven years, he can justifyably feel proud of himself.

Titles with Porto in Portugal in 2003 and 2004, with Chelsea in England in 2005 and 2006 and now Inter in Italy in 2009 is a record that would compare favourably to any coach.

But it is his Champions League victory with Porto in 2004 that he needs to repeat or Mourinho’s spell in Milan could quickly turn sour.