“I’d Leave That Pitch in a Coffin for Him”: Chelsea Legends Remember Mourinho’s Painful Exit

Some football departures are transfers. Some are breakups. José Mourinho’s exit from Chelsea in September 2007 was something closer to a bereavement.

In a new three-part documentary on the Portuguese manager, Chelsea icons Frank Lampard and John Terry have revisited the moment Mourinho walked into the dressing room and told his players he had been sacked.

Lampard still remembers the shock. “I could not think about how much this man had helped my career, how much I loved working with him,” he recalled, according to Goal.com. “There were tears.”

That was not normal football dressing-room behaviour. It was Mourinho's Chelsea. And for players who had grown with him, won with him and transformed the club with him, the ending hurt. “I would leave that pitch in a coffin for him”

Terry's memory is even more visceral. Looking back at Chelsea's 1-1 Champions League draw against Rosenborg, one of the results that preceded Mourinho's departure, the former captain still carries a sense of personal guilt. “I would leave that pitch in a coffin for him,” Terry said.

He remembers grown men crying and struggling to understand why their manager was suddenly gone. Then came the line that reveals how deeply he still feels it: “I still feel kind of responsible for that.”

By then, Mourinho's relationship with Chelsea owner Roman Abramovich had deteriorated. Mourinho later described the club's original leadership structure as a triangle between himself, chief executive Peter Kenyon and Abramovich. He believed that structure had been disrupted by outside influences.

“The triangle: Jose, Peter Kenyon, Roman was invaded by strangers,” he recalled. The tension eventually became impossible to contain. Mourinho left after a spectacular first spell in which he ended Chelsea's 50-year wait for a top-flight league title, winning the Premier League in 2004-05 and retaining it the following season. He had changed the club. But he could not save the relationship at its centre.

Mourinho eventually returned to Chelsea in 2013 and delivered another Premier League title in 2014-15. The first goodbye, however, remained the one that hurt. For Lampard and Terry, it was not simply the end of a manager's reign. It was the end of an era they still struggle to describe without emotion.

(With inputs from ANI)