Very Specific Football Question No.9: Why can't Jose Mourinho win in Newcastle?

Jose Mourinho will be the first person to tell you that wherever he has been, he has been a winner. Whether lifting the Champions League with Porto, conquering Camp Nou with Inter Milan, racking up 100 points in La Liga with Real Madrid or repeatedly leading Chelsea to Premier League glory, the Blues manager’s aptitude for winning is undisputed.

He has usurped Sir Alex Ferguson, outsmarted Manuel Pellegrini, destroyed Brendan Rodgers and treated Arsene Wenger as his personal plaything – simply through beating them. In football, in life, in love, probably in Monopoly and Mario Kart too, the man is a winning machine.

Yet we were reminded this weekend of a rather startling fact about Jose. One curious, apparently inexplicable chink in his armour. There is one place that he can’t win: Newcastle.

Saturday’s scarcely deserved 2-2 draw with the struggling Magpies was Jose’s sixth Premier League visit to St James’s Park and the sixth time he has returned to London without a victory. Every time he has taken a Chelsea team north they have been favourites to win, just as they were on Saturday against Steve McClaren’s beleaguered outfit, and each time – aside from the odd low-key Carling Cup success - they have failed to do so.

But why? What it is about Newcastle that ruin’s Mourinho’s mojo?

It’s not a north-east thing, as Mourinho has enjoyed plenty of victories in Sunderland. It’s not the weather, because Jose has been just as unsuccessful in sunny May as he has in nippy November. And it can’t be the Newcastle players. Not because the current crop aren’t very good, but because they have always been different. For example, when Mourinho first travelled to St James’ Park for a league match they had Titus Bramble and Jean Alain-Boumsong playing at centre-back, and he couldn’t beat them either. The same goes for managers, with Graeme Souness, Glenn Roeder and Alan Pardew, just like McClaren, all proving strangely immune to the powers of Mourinho’s victory juice.

So what has been the one constant throughout this tale of unrelenting misery? They key to Mourinho’s undoing. His secret Achilles’ heel. It’s clear there is only one possible answer: it’s Geordies.

Jose Mourinho can’t handle Geordies.

If he sees them swigging from bottles of Newcastle Brown Ale on their way to the ground, he gets uneasy. Whenever the smell of a half-eaten Greggs pasty wafts towards the dugout from the Gallowgate End, he recoils in horror. And if he sees a Toon Army fanatic wearing nothing but a black-and-white T-shirt on the kind of glacial January day that would prompt a national emergency in his hometown of Lisbon, he has full-on palpitations.

He avoids Alan Shearer, he can’t stand Cheryl Fernandez-Versini, and he has a recurring nightmare in which Jimmy Five Bellies give him a friendly slap on the back and shouts,”Wey aye, man” into his face.

Mourinho has an acute and debilitating case of Toonaphobia. His instinctive reaction on seeing a Geordie is to run away screaming, or simply to shoot them dead in self-defence, yet he is forced to travel to Newcastle once a year for his job. And although he puts on a brave face, the manager’s inner turmoil invariably filters down to his players. Is it any wonder they gave a “minus one out of 10” performance on Saturday?

They say we most fear what we don’t understand, and this is perhaps the crux of Mourinho’s condition. A man who is fluent in French, Spanish, Italian and English as well as his native tongue – a qualified translator, no less – but one who is rendered baffled by the simplest of Geordie phrases. A proud linguistic scholar who has spent countless sleepless night trying to work out “Howay the lads” actually means. It’s no coincidence that Mourinho has built diverse squads containing every nationality from Croatian to Colombian to cockney, but he has never, ever signed a Geordie. And he never will.

It is time for Jose Mourinho’s Toonaphobia to be taken seriously by the football community. The man needs help. The only cure is for him to face his fear, head-on. We’re calling on Shearer, Fernandez-Versini, Five Bellies, Gazza, Sting, Big Brother voiceover bloke, Ant, Dec, Chris Waddle and all the rest to meet Jose in person and smother him in a good old group hug of Geordie love. It’s the only way to end this nightmare.

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