When Jose Mourinho returned to Chelsea last summer, he took a look over his squad and decided he had too many No 10s, the creative attacking midfielders whose preferred position on the pitch is just behind the centre forward.
The “No 10” is a term he uses and one of those designations football’s theoreticians argue zealously over: purists lament that modern emphases on speed and strength risks the extinction of “the true No 10”.
Yet, certain elite clubs still collect an excess of them, or at least of footballers who think of themselves as No 10s.
In his three years at Real Madrid, Mourinho had at various times Mesut Ozil, Kaka, Luka Modric, Sergio Canales and, briefly, Guti and Rafael Van der Vaart.
At Chelsea he works with Oscar, Eden Hazard, Willian, Andre Schurrle and the Nigerian John Obi Mikel, who, like Modric, began his career in the role, but has since found a niche deeper in midfield.
At Chelsea, Mourinho has overseen the sale of Juan Mata, Chelsea’s Player of the Year in 2013, and the loaning out of Kevin De Bruyne, the Belgian who operates in a No 10 position at Wolfsburg.
Both Mata and De Bruyne were criticised by the Chelsea head coach for not attending to the defensive aspects of their midfield work. Oscar, meanwhile, was celebrated from the outset as the squad’s “best No 10”.
Madrid and Chelsea are the two clubs at which Mourinho has not won the Champions League, the competition in whose quarter-finals the Londoners host Galatasaray tonight, after a 1-1 draw in the first leg in Istanbul.
At Porto and at Inter Milan, he built European champion teams around clear, irreplaceable No 10s. Porto’s football in 2004 was lubricated by Deco at the front of a midfield diamond; Inter in 2009/10 made Dutchman Wesley Sneijder the focus of their game plan.
Sneijder, now of Galatasaray, would bow to nobody in his admiration of Mourinho’s qualities both as tactician and man-manager.
“A year playing under Mourinho is worth 10 years with other coaches,” Sneijder said last year, after revealing he had asked the Portuguese’s advice on whether to join the Turkish club from Inter in January 2013, when his career in Italy, at an Inter who stumbled after Mourinho, was drifting.
Mourinho made him feel crucial to Inter, a 10-out-of-10 No 10.
Sneijder is important to Galatasaray, too, although the topic of how he is best used is regularly under scrutiny. Coach Roberto Mancini has Sneijder starting games, typically, from a position wide on the left and, from there, supplying passes and crosses to Didier Drogba at centre forward.
Since January he has been developing a relationship with the Brazilian left-back Alex Telles, who likes to overlap.
Is that the best role for Sneijder? Not according to Louis Van Gaal, the experienced and opinionated coach of Holland.
“He would never play on the left of midfield for us,” Van Gaal said before the Dutch team’s latest international, against France. “You want him where he can make the difference.”
Van Gaal was reported to have advised Sneijder to seek a move to Chelsea last summer and a reunion with Mourinho.
Mancini, though, has a clear idea of how he wants his front six to work and, in the first leg against Chelsea, it was initially a very bold idea, with Sneijder pushed high up the flank and central midfielders, Felipe Melo and skipper Selcuk Inan, also pressing from forward of the halfway line.
Chelsea punished the space behind the high line to take the lead. Mancini then reconfigured and Galatasaray played with more security and confidence.
Close observers of Mancini’s team believe he has his senior players functioning well together.
“They like to open up from the back and push their full-backs quite high,” says Slaven Bilic, the coach of Besiktas, the Istanbul club challenging Galatasaray and Fenerbahce at the top of the Turkish league.
“But if you neutralise the main players in the midfield, Melo, Selcuk, Sneijder, then you give yourself a chance against them.”
After a weekend when they received two red cards – Willian and Ramires were sent off in Saturday’s defeat against Aston Villa – Chelsea will be wary of how forcefully and cleanly they neutralise Mancini’s creators.
Sneijder can also be a magician with a direct free kick.
sports@thenational.ae
Follow us on Twitter at SprtNationalUAE