West Ham manager Slaven Bilic has backed Jose Mourinho after the Chelsea manager is currently in under-fire to get his side back to winnings ways.
Both managers will come face to face for the first time on Saturday since the West Ham head coach arrived in the Premier League in the summer, and while Bilic is enjoying a great start to the season, Mourinho sees his Chelsea side in the bottom half of the league standings.
Chelsea appeared as the best team in the league last season after winning their fourth title in the club’s history, but have been awful this season after losing four out of nine games this season.
Bilic reckons how Jose welcomed him to the Premier League with a phone call shortly after he was announced as Hammers manager and claims he frequentlly exchanges texts with the ‘great’ Portuguese manager.
Jealousy is a big part,” he said. “When you are on top, people are praising you. I heard that from English press ages ago when I was playing here. They said one of the biggest reasons why we are building you is to knock you down.
The most successful people, the most charismatic people, the No.1s, they are always polarising people. You love them or hate them.
I am not trying to campaign to become a president or Prime Minister of England by winning a popularity contest.If we are talking about Mourinho, I don’t know the percentage of the people who adore him or don’t like him. The Italians say it is paper in your hand – your record – that counts. It’s unbelievable. It’s the best.
There’s no chance that you don’t respect him and all that he has done. His CV is unbelievable.I don’t know him as a friend, but only because we’ve hardly met. We never met apart from last year when we played a friendly tournament in Istanbul, a charity thing with Fenerbahce, Chelsea and Besiktas. We won 1-0, but it was only 45 minutes.
Then, the day after I signed for West Ham I was back home in Split, in Croatia, and I got a text. It was a good text, ‘Good luck, I hope you’re going to do well, Jose Mourinho’.
I thought that someone was winding me up, of course. But then Demba Ba called me from Istanbul and said The Boss had asked him for my number. I was pleased and since then we have been exchanging texts. I like him a lot. I really like him.
The former Besiktas manager went on to express his opinion on whether Jose is boring. In his view, the former Real Madrid manager gives the media what they like to feed off and brands him as a man who will never lose his charisma.
No, you can’t lose charisma, especially not him,
Charisma is one of the most important things as a manager and as a leader. It is the same to be the manager of a bank. People are expecting you to be different and to have something that the other guys don’t have. For that charisma is very important.
He is not boring. He is anything but boring. That is the one thing that he didn’t change from the start until now. That is why you are writing about him every day and you are asking me questions about him.
We played Manchester City before and we played Arsenal before that, we played Crystal Palace a week ago and nobody asked me so many questions about Manuel Pellegini, Arsene Wenger, Alan Pardew or all those others.
But you are asking me so much about Mourinho… I’ll have to put training back to the afternoon now!
Jose Mourinho, Source: Daily Express
