Leicester know a thing or two about Foxes, but be prepared to watch the feathers fly on Thursday night.
The craftiest, brightest predator slinks into the chicken coop and would just love to cause mayhem. Jose Mourinho steps back onto English soil and he’ll prowl the King Power technical area like a mischievous intruder that refuses to be shooed away.
‘Foxes Never Quit’ is writ large at the stadium and that could have been crafted with wily old Mourinho in mind. Make no mistake, gunslinger Jose will take special delight in doing a job on Brendan Rodgers on his own patch. The former Chelsea, Manchester United and Tottenham boss secretly stings at those who think he’s lost that twinkle and his powers are on the wane.
He sees Rodgers very much as a young pretender, a man he actually set on the way to becoming a top boss. And for that reason alone, the Portuguese enigma would love nothing more than for his Roma side to come to England and flee in the night with a job well done.
It is ironic that two men who share so much in common - they even have the same birthday - now find themselves so far apart. Mourinho, just short of 60, still steps through the ropes and into the ring for another fight desperate to cock a snook at those he sees as taking his place. When Mourinho gave Rodgers his big break in 2004 by appointing him as Chelsea’s youth team coach in 2004, no-one could have predicted that their lives would be inextricably woven together.
How peculiar that the defining moment between the two men should end up being a mistake that has gone down in footballing folklore. How cruel that for all their meetings, the one stand-out moment all hinged on one of the cruellest slips of all time. That came at Anfield in April 2014 when Rodgers had masterminded Liverpool to within a whisker of a fairytale title win.
Rodger’s Red machine was on an 11-match winning run and years of title hurt looked set to be banished. How painful that two men who pride themselves on meticulous detail should be ‘twinned’ by a moment of calamity. Steven Gerrard slipped, Demba Ba pounced and scored and though it was of little benefit to Chelsea or Mourinho, the title was gone.
Years later, rumours that their relationship had deteriorated have been played down by both men - but there’s a feeling it’s definitely not what it was. Rodgers criticised his former mentor’s approach to the game accusing him of “parking two buses”; a jibe that rankled with Mourinho.
Yet Rodgers has never wavered in publicly acknowledging respect for his mentor. It won’t have gone unnoticed with Mourinho that Rodgers was tipped to succeed him at Tottenham in recent times, and that his name was also up near the top whenever Manchester United span the Old Trafford managerial merry-go-round.
Rodgers might only be a decade younger to the day but with Mourinho desperate to prove his light isn’t dimming, that’s enough of a threat to spur him on. The Leicester boss has publicly stated that, but for Jose, he wouldn’t be where he was today - but revealed that contact between them in recent times has been minimal.
“You don’t have the conversations you had before and ultimately you become a rival. But certainly the respect hasn’t dropped or been lost. He is a good man,” Rodgers said recently. Mourinho, for his part, says nothing Rodgers has done surprises him.
“I’m not impressed, I know how good he is. When I met him as a young coach in the academy, and coming to join us in the first team and sharing with us many moments, I understood that he was a young guy with a great future. So anything he’s doing in his career is not a surprise for me, not at all. He’s very talented, he was and probably still is a guy who likes to study, learn and improve. He’s creative, he knows what he wants. He’s a very good coach. Period. He’s a very good coach so it’s not a surprise for me.”
The fox is on the loose - feathers will be ruffled.
