‘It felt like the epicentre of world football’ – Joe Cole on Chelsea, Mourinho and ‘complete lies’ | OneFootball

August 15, 2004 saw a new era start at Chelsea.

A fresh-faced, tanned, slick-looking Jose Mourinho strode up the Stamford Bridge tunnel before taking his place on the bench for the very first time. One leg crossed over the other, Mourinho chewed gum as the world’s cameras pointed at him, looking like a man who knew every step the future before him would take.

Several rows behind him, Joe Cole was far less certain.

Having been told during pre-season that he was part of the new manager’s plans, Cole instead found himself out of the matchday squad entirely. A meeting quickly followed with Mourinho saying “your chance will come” and even when it did come, it came with caveats.

Given his promised opportunity, Cole took it and by October he was a regular in the side that would go on to win the Premier League. It was in that month that he scored the only goal of Liverpool’s visit to Stamford Bridge in what was the first meeting between Mourinho and Rafa Benitez and the formation of a new rivalry. Cole felt like the hero he admits he wanted to be.

Drinks were toasted, celebrations were had and as Cole was nursing whatever ailments came as a result of a night out in the posh part of London, he glanced upon the Sunday papers to see what his manager had said.

Mourinho had slaughtered him. Forgetting the winning goal, the Portuguese boss said Cole played with “two faces – attacking and defensive”. Mourinho said the media wanted to “put Joe Cole on the moon”, whereas he wanted to “kick him”.

“One thing he does is he comes in, and I think he tests,” Cole told Football365, 21 years on. “People are fascinated by the relationship because so much of it was public, there’s a lot of criticism, things like that.

“People are sometimes a bit baffled when I say I didn’t see any problem. Straight talking is good for football and footballers, you don’t want to be dilly-dallying.

“If somebody’s not doing something and you want them to do it, you have to tell them. I’ve seen it before, where managers are just done with players, they’re pushed to the side.

“The manager has a finite amount of energy, so if the manager is on a player, he must believe that he’s got something and ultimately, we went on to achieve some really good things.

“He used the media to communicate to his players at times what is needed. Very measured, you don’t become a top manager like that without understanding the mechanics of it. But he was great, he was more playful with the players, obviously, and I thought he was a breath of fresh air at the time.”

Cole was not the first recipient of a Mourinho takedown nor would he be the last, but his willingness to accept the perhaps overly harsh criticism came because of the belief that something special was happening.

Cole had arrived at Chelsea a year before from the relegated West Ham. If the teenager was the star at Upton Park, moving to Chelsea meant becoming more of a supporting cast member.

“I knew the level of football had gone up from West Ham,” he said. “Obviously, playing with people like Jimmy [Floyd Hasselbaink] and Eidur [Gudjohnsen] and Frank [Lampard] and [Hernan] Crespo. It felt like the epicentre of world football was there.

“It felt like the whole of the eyes of the footballing world were on Chelsea at that time.”

Jose thought that too. A press conference saw him announce himself as the ‘Special One’ but instead of the players wondering if David Brent had become their new manager, they bought in immediately.

“It made you sort of stand up,” Cole said of that press conference. “You want your leader to have a bit of swagger about him and he certainly had that.

“We really just believed in him straight away. He had this way, like all good leaders, of getting his team to buy into what he was doing and what he was saying. It was purposeful what he said, it wasn’t a mistake.

“Everyone bought in and it was just a case of you had a feeling something special was going to happen, and you wanted to be on the train. The ones that weren’t were quickly shipped out.

“I think he’s very good at that. He works out who he can trust, and who he can’t, and if he can’t, they were out the door.”

Mourinho’s methods brought results. Chelsea became Premier League champions for the first time. By the time Cole left his boyhood club, he had winners’ medals for three Premier League titles, two FA Cups, one League Cup and a Ballon d’Or nomination.

But more than the trophies, the biggest reward of a career in football though was perhaps saving him from a life behind bars.

As a kid, Cole was told his father was a helicopter pilot, a plausible story for when they used to go and visit him at a secret base in north London. That secret base though was in reality HMP Pentonville and Cole Sr was serving time for stealing a till from a post office.

Cole grew up in central London surrounded by characters that would have fit neatly into the cast of Snatch. While his dad had numerous trips to prison, Cole insists he would have never followed that path if football was not an option.

“I wouldn’t have followed my dad into what he was doing because I just wouldn’t,” Cole said.

“I would have been a greengrocer. I would have left school at 16, worked on the stalls with my dad. I might have done the Knowledge and become a black cab driver.

“It’s one of the main reasons for me writing the book – wanting to explain to my kids and my grandkids, and hopefully my great grandkids, that they live in a very different world to where I grew up. And I wanted to explain to them not just the bad side of it, but also the good side of it.”

At the age of 16, the former council house tenant found himself on the front page of a national newspaper. The piece, based off a reporter’s heckling of Cole’s parents, claimed he earned £5,000 a week and regardless of how true or not it was – Cole claims it was a fifth of that – it shot him to national fame and gave him a ‘young prodigy’ reputation to live up to.

“I was an unusual footballer,” he said. “My reputation grew from ‘this kid, he’s different, he can do something with the ball,’ and then it becomes mysterious.

“It was pre-internet, right? So you become mysterious but then you play games, and then your reputation grows and then you’re in headlines and newspapers at 16, and then all of a sudden, you feel the eyes on you when you’re playing.

“The big thing for me was when I was on the front page of the newspaper as a kid – complete lies and fabrication – and that was a hard thing to learn from just as a human.

“Thinking ‘oh, shit, not everything in a newspaper is real.’ I already had a natural tendency to question authority anyway, from my upbringing, and so you sort of become more defensive and things like that so it shapes you, the journey you are on. But it just sharpened my determination to be a footballer, which was all I ever wanted to be.”

That footballer was also arguably one born in the wrong generation. The perceived defensive weakness that Mourinho took issue with is no longer expected of the best wingers in the world. Sure, they are required to track back now and then but in Cole’s era, stopping your opponent scoring was just as big a job as scoring yourself.

“I think it’s just more of an emphasis on technical ability and intelligence,” he said of the differences between the two eras. “Football intelligence, things that I was good at. The sort of qualities you could only use once you’d won whatever battle was going on.

“The rules have changed. The pitch has changed. I think if you understand football, you would understand my attributes would be more suited for this game.

“But you don’t you take anything for granted. Be happy with what you got and I’m blessed that I’ve done it. Of course, it would have been a lot easier player with my attributes to fit into today’s football.”

Cole’s post-Chelsea career is also one full of stories. Moving to Liverpool but being sent out on loan to Lille, where he encountered a young Eden Hazard, someone Cole describes as the most naturally talented player has ever played with. Returning to Anfield only to be at odds with new manager Brendan Rodgers. Moving back to West Ham where Sam Allardyce told him quick passes attempting to play in the full back “wasn’t what we do here”. He even played for Tampa Bay Rowdies.

Having grown up only ever wanting to play football, when he retired, Cole did what many in their 30s do – physical challenges.

“I did Mont Blanc. Kayaked the Channel. I had a boxing match, rode a bike to Amsterdam. Not all in one day.

“I’ve got a very active mind, and you’re trying to, like you, trying to replace the playing.”

Eventually, Cole settled into a punditry role with BT, now TNT Sports, but admitted he does have a desire to coach one day.

“At some point, I’ll take a job somewhere,” he declared.

“It has to be right. The level won’t be a problem, it will be who am I working with? What are the parameters? I like to collaborate, but I have certain non-negotiables of what I would want, and if all of them things were met, I’d do it. I’d do it tomorrow. It has to be with the right people and doing it together.

“I’ve got a vision that I think will be unusual in the way I feel it should be done, backed up by my lived experience and a little bit of research as well and people I want to work with.

“It might look very different to what everyone else is doing so it has to get good buy-in from an owner.”