sport news Lure of Juventus treble could reunite Ronaldo and Mourinho

View
comments

It won’t all be playing sailing if Cristiano Ronaldo and Jose Mourinho get back together – it certainly never was before – but Ronaldo still remembers Mourinho as football’s greatest winner, not the game’s biggest whinger, and that’s why he would back the 56-year-old’s return to management at Juventus as Massimiliano Allegri's replacement.

Ronaldo has won five Champions Leagues and yet when he retires he will look back on the 2011-12 La Liga season as one of his greatest achievements. Beating Pep Guardiola’s Barcelona to the title and so knocking the greatest ever Barcelona team off their perch is hard to top and he achieved that arm in arm with his compatriot and manager.

Mourinho built the team to suit Ronaldo’s needs. His position on the left of the front three was never up for debate and it was a system that subsequent coaches Carlo Ancelotti and Zinedine Zidane maintained because they accepted it got the best out of the team’s best player.

Ancelotti adored Ronaldo – called him ‘worth a goal start in every game’ – and one of the biggest reasons why Zidane left last summer is because he sensed the club would do nothing to stop their all-time record scorer leaving. 

But it was the bond with Mourinho that was the strongest because it was forged in the most trying of times.

Barcelona were unstoppable but Ronaldo and Mourinho found a way – first in the Spanish Cup final of 2011 when Ronaldo got the winner, and then in the following league season. 

What they won together was ultimately over-shadowed by what they did not win – three Champions League semi-final exits – and fallings out around those disappointments tarnished their relationship.

The last public image of Mourinho and Ronaldo together at the Santiago Bernabeu was of the pair in the mouth of the tunnel deliberately avoiding eye

read more from dailymail.....