No way, Jose

So, the gods had feet of clay. All-conquering, omnipotent, all-powerful Barcelona turned out to be a perfectly beatable football team with significant defensive frailties, rather than the second coming of Jesus Christ. Maybe romance is dead after all. Ninety per cent of neutrals will have been deflated somewhat by the swish Catalans’ exit at the hands of Jose Mourinho’s grim-faced Inter, who will never be easy to love.

As was the case with Chelsea and Porto, Mourinho has shaped the team very much in his image: they’re hard-nosed, brilliantly organised, functional and more than a little cynical. Yet the manager’s flamboyant personality doesn’t in any way translate to the team’s style of play, and when the occasion demands (as was the case on this occasion) they’re inclined to play suffocatingly dull safety-first percentage football.
It works for them, clearly, and Inter have to be applauded on one level for their phenomenally disciplined defensive display against a team who, as is their wont, utterly monopolised possession from start to finish. Nonetheless, it’s difficult to see how anyone could take them to their hearts. I’m not often inclined to quote statistics, but try this one: Barca completed 548 passes that night to Inter’s 67, and still got knocked out.
Without wanting to whip this up into a battle between Good and Evil, it’s fair to say the two teams embody diametrically opposing visions of the way the game should be played. After Motta’s sending off, Inter discarded any pretence of attacking ambition and adopted an impenetrable 8-1-0 formation. It did the trick, and those who’d dismissed Barca as all foreplay and no penetration had their viewpoint vindicated for once.
Bad blood and poisonous ill-feeling engulfed the Nou Camp at the final whistle, as the ‘Special One’ predictably hammed it up, manically leaping around in a blatantly obvious attempt to rub the Barca fans’ noses in it. It was a crass, graceless performance, and strengthened the suspicion that Jose may well become the first manager in footballing history to become assassinated if he keeps courting enemies at this rate.
The man is undeniably a tactical genius and by far the most memorable media performer of his generation, but you can see why plenty of observers don’t see the funny side.
His colossal ego, preening arrogance and tendency to refer to himself in the third person have on occasion invited comparisons to Muhammad Ali: personally, I find Mourinho calls to mind no-one so much as the great ’80s American wrestler Ravishing Rick Rude, now tragically deceased before his allotted threescore-years-and-ten, like the vast majority of his steroid-ravaged peers (For those of you too young to remember the great man, a few priceless clips survive on YouTube).
Jose is now one victory away from becoming European champion and Overlord of the Universe again, with only Bayern Munich standing in his way. The Bavarians are no world-beaters, having been scalped home and away by Bordeaux in the group stages, and their first-half display in the quarter-final at Old Trafford (three-nil down after half an hour) was a graphic illustration of just how sub-ordinary they can look when off their game.
Nonetheless, they still won that one (anyone who knocks Man United out of any competition deserves a warm pat on the back), are nothing if not resilient, and their emphatic 3-0 demolition of Lyon in the semi-final away leg was easily the best they’ve played in Europe all season. They’re a physically imposing if cumbersome crew, with at least one world-class operator in Arjen Robben (I wouldn’t quite place Franck Ribery in the same class, and continue to be flabbergasted by his apparent £50 million price-tag).
Still, it’s extraordinarily difficult to envisage them overcoming Inter in the Final. Inter’s all-South American back four (Maicon, Lucio, Walter Samuel and the ageless Zanetti) is the closest thing we’ve seen to an immovable object since Mourinho’s Chelsea days, and it can be doubted whether Bayern’s strike force has the guile or invention that will be needed to break them down. On balance, I suspect I’ll be rooting for Bayern — while hardly an aesthetic treat, there’s a commendable honesty and directness about them — but have to conclude that, having put Chelsea, CSKA Moscow and Barcelona to the sword already, Inter are wholly unlikely to trip up at the final hurdle.
Elsewhere, a minute’s applause please for Steve Davis, who at the age of 52, rolled back the years with a roller-coaster adventure through the World Snooker championships, managing to gatecrash the last eight before being admittedly mutilated by the mercurial Aussie Neil Robertson.
Widely dismissed as a charmless Tory geek back in his early-Eighties, the ginger one has gone on to establish himself as a fine pundit and unimpeachably nice bloke, and still hasn’t lost his touch on the baize. Reliable sources also inform me that the man is an enthusiastic collector of Northern soul and Sixties garage-punk records. They say Ronnie O’Sullivan is more or less the last of the true rock’n’roll snooker players, but I’d like to think the Romford renegade can still give him a run for his money. Come back next year, sir.