In defense of Jose Mourinho

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Luca Ghidoni/Icon SMIThe Special One deserves our applause, not derision, for what he's done against Barcelona in the past couple of weeks.

At the beginning of the season, Jose Mourinho warned that he was no "Harry Potter" capable of instantly producing wonderful Bernabeu magic at the wave of his wand. But over the past two weeks, the Special One has cast such a spell on Barcelona that, for his legion of detractors, Mourinho has suddenly been cast instead as that uber practitioner of the dark arts, Lord Voldemort.

Will he break his glowering silence and finally speak? What does he have up his sleeve this time? Does he hate everything beautiful and is he the bleakest force of destruction football has ever known?

Well, speaking personally, the greatest trick Mourinho ever pulled is casting me, here in this space for a second week running, as his chief defender.

As someone who certainly finds more personal enjoyment in the Barcelona brand of football when Lionel Messi & Co. are at their buzzing, champagne best, I have to say that the avalanche of attacks against Mourinho and his team are unjustified.

As we stand on the verge of Part 3 of the Clasico quartet, the first leg of the Champions League clash between these two teams at the Bernabeu, the Special One definitely has the advantage. But from the flood of anguished protests in the Spanish media and on Twitter, you'd think his advantage had been gained by the greatest attack on civilization since the Goths, Visigoths and Vandals appeared on the brow of the Palatine Hill and the ancient Romans, looking up, said: "Hmm, this doesn't look too promising for the future of our roads, sanitation and viniculture." Mourinho and his men have been painted as a bunch of blackjack-wielding thugs who grow the Bernabeu grass like a jungle, kick anything that moves, renounce all possession of the ball and effectively besmirch the name of football.

Well, I'm not having it.

Last week, I warned that Johan Cruyff and Alfredo di Stefano had got it wrong in mocking Real Madrid's tactics in the first Clasico, and stated that Mourinho's side had built a clever physical, mental and sporting advantage that might bring it rewards.

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Manuel Queimadelos Alonso/Getty ImagesLionel Messi dropped too deep in the Copa del Rey final to consistently threaten Real Madrid.

Lo and behold, Real won the Copa del Rey for the first time in 18 years before ramming six past Valencia in the league this past weekend.

But before the whiners claim it was all achieved unfairly, let's look at a few statistics.

Thuggish? The cup final saw 50 fouls, but they were divided 26-24 between Madrid and Pep Guardiola's beaten warriors. Not by any means a statistic that suggests Barcelona was pushed around.

Anti-football? The past two Clasicos have given us 22 on-target efforts, which Madrid led 12-10 on proper goal chances and 2-1 on goals scored. That is football, and that is good enough for me.

Although we have been reveling in the enormously seductive soccer that Barca and Spain have been playing over the past few years, some people have become drunk with adoration. They have forgotten that while Barcelona, at its best, is exciting to watch, this is football, not abstract art.

Some critics believe that possession of the ball is a victory in itself so long as it is constantly used positively and attractively, a la Barcelona's style of play.

Not true.

It chafes Madrid's critics that Los Blancos have averaged only 29 percent of possession across the past two Clasicos. This shouldn't surprise us, however. Last season, Mourinho's Inter had 32 percent of the ball against Barca and not only won 3-1 at the San Siro in the first leg of their semifinal encounter, but also went on to defeat the Catalans 3-2 on aggregate and conquer Europe.

Guardiola and his squad have not forgotten that football is about winning. But while they do talk about "defending a style" and would never try to play similarly to Mourinho's Madrid, it has hurt them that they have just hit a low point in mental and physical freshness at precisely the wrong time.

“

Mourinho simply stated to us that Barcelona are human and will make mistakes if you press them. So as soon as we saw them committing errors when under pressure, we drew heart.

” -- Real's Emmanuel Adebayor after the Copa del Rey

I sympathize with them because they are, largely, paying a price for two factors out of their control.

One, David Villa, Xavi, Andres Iniesta, Carles Puyol and Messi have largely played without a proper summer rest since 2007, while Pedro, Gerard Pique and Sergio Busquets have been playing nonstop, full-tilt football since breaking into the Barcelona and Spain teams, respectively. Sure, Madrid has some players in similar positions, but not as many. Mourinho also has a deeper squad.

Two, Barcelona is paying for the foolhardy spending in president Joan Laporta's last year in charge at Camp Nou. Ridiculous sums were spent on Zlatan Ibrahimovic and Dmytro Chygrynskiy, and Ibra has been loaned out and Chygrynskiy sold at a loss.

The fact that Barca's global debt was 600 million euros this past summer meant that Guardiola, despite not wanting a huge squad, was unable to either keep Chygrynskiy or sign Cesc Fabregas -- both of which he wanted to do. While he ponders playing the semi-fit Puyol or defensive midfielder Javier Mascherano at left back, given that Eric Abidal, Adriano and Maxwell are all sick or injured, Guardiola will regret that his squad isn't better off by two, perhaps three, top-class players.

Speaking of Puyol, I asked him during the 2010 World Cup how it was that Spain consistently won games in extremis. Its qualifying record was full of dramatic late wins and single-goal victories that owed everything to a surge of power and skill in the last fifteen minutes of games. Was it because of extra fitness, I asked?

"No, it's because we own possession for so long in games that the other team gets tired chasing us and, by the end, they are bound to make small mistakes which we are fresh and skilled enough to take advantage of," Puyol said.

But Mourinho knows how to counter this tactic. He makes sure his team doesn't chase possession, thus tiring itself out, but instead uses what little it gets of the ball to devastating effect. Mourinho also has his players press the ball very hard in certain areas of the pitch to see whether Barcelona is at its physical and mental best.

With Inter in 2009, Mourinho suffered a 2-0 defeat at Camp Nou, which could have been by five. This season with Madrid, he suffered a 5-0 defeat that could have been by eight.

But both defeats came in November, when Barcelona was still firing on all cylinders.

Come spring, it's been a different story. Inter trampled all over Barcelona exactly one year ago, and for all the merit of Inter's performance, it is also true that Guardiola's men looked tired and frail in Milan.

Now Mourinho's Madrid is gaining momentum, having produced a 1-1 draw at the Bernabeu despite being a man down and winning the Copa del Rey in extra time. After the cup final, Emmanuel Adebayor told me: "Mourinho simply stated to us that Barcelona are not 'Robocop' -- they are human and will make mistakes if you press them. So as soon as we saw them committing errors when under pressure, we drew heart and, personally, I think we hunted them down like lions or tigers."

Right now the situation looks a little grave for Barcelona: tired players and injured stars.

But Barcelona had chances to win both games, produced some lovely football in Valencia in the cup final, and are far, far from being out of this contest.

However, Guardiola's side must answer two key questions:

1. Why is the manager allowing Messi to drop so deep? Barca has educated us over many years that the 4-3-3 system is like a finely tuned Olympic athlete -- utterly brilliant and unstoppable when in full flow, but susceptible to colds, tummy bugs and little muscle twinges. So why is Guardiola permitting Messi, nominally the center forward, to drop so deep that he was practically playing in a different city during last week's cup final?

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Manuel Queimadelos Alonso/Getty ImagesReal Madrid has done an excellent job of pressing Barcelona.

Neither did Villa nor Pedro stretch the pitch widely enough by playing close to each touchline for the midfield to get space to outpass Madrid's aggressive pressing. So Guardiola will have to sort this issue out before Wednesday's match.

2. Can Guardiola and his men find hidden reserves of confidence, energy and desire?

Barca is clearly the more tired and less deep squad and, frankly, Madrid has been significantly hungrier in its approach to the past two games. However, my admiration for this Barcelona squad is not built solely on its wonderful football prowess, but also on the fact that it possesses a strong winners' mentality.

I believe that Mourinho thinks Barca is close to a breaking point and, as such, he'll tell his team to try to blitzkrieg the Catalans with quick goals and a high-tempo attacking performance Wednesday. The past two games have been his rope-a-dope moments, and now the Special One is ready to attack. The fact that he now has both Gonzalo Higuain and Karim Benzema back fit and scoring adds awesome attacking power to his team.

And the appointment of Wolfgang Stark as the match referee should, in theory, help Mourinho's tactics. Stark has a tradition of being much more permissive regarding physical play than Spanish teams are used to. Given the past two Clasicos, that is the last thing Barcelona wants to hear.

Mind you, Madrid will need to stay within the limits. It will miss Ricardo Carvalho for this match because of the yellow card he picked up at Spurs in the previous round, and Real has four more players (Cristiano Ronaldo, Angel Di Maria, Sergio Ramos and Raul Albiol) who are one booking away from a suspension for the return leg at Camp Nou.

I don't know about you, but to me football is a big church that welcomes all styles of play. And what I've seen the past couple of weeks from Madrid isn't a million miles away from the kind of football that Billy Bremner, Graeme Souness, Bryan Robson, Rino Gattuso, Patrick Vieira and Jens Jeremies used to win in recent eras.

As far as I'm concerned, this is epic, enthralling entertainment, and may the better team win -- in whichever way it chooses to achieve it.

Graham Hunter is a Barcelona-based freelance writer for ESPN.com who specializes in La Liga and the Spanish national team. You can reach him on Twitter at twitter.com/BumperGraham.

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Graham Hunter

ESPN.com freelance columnist

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Graham Hunter is a Barcelona-based freelance writer for ESPN.com who specializes in La Liga and the Spanish national team.