Jose Mourinho’s latest sermon: Jude Bellingham as gospel

Parking the bus. That’s the verdict history has handed down on Jose Mourinho – repeated so often that it has calcified into fact. It’s like a half-truth, enough to make it stick, but never quite enough to make it whole.

But Mourinho has worn it the way a magician wears a top hat: perfectly tailored, endlessly convenient, and never, not for one second, the whole trick.

Call him defensive, and you have only named the shadow he casts, not the man casting it. His teams defend well not because attack frightens him, but because chaos does. Evidently, in a Mourinho side, nothing is left to chance, more so when the motions of the game have already strangled every other variable into submission.

Pragmatism is the colder, harder word – less quotable and less fun to chant from the grandstands. So the easier opinion has survived instead, passed down like folklore.