My ideas could not develop.”Other football men might have lingered amid the prestige and the “potential” of a great club. “I could have stayed around, but I knew my work could not prosper there. He enjoys the good life, but sees it as merely a reflection of success “I have a good car, but only one at a time. I like good holidays with my family, I like us to live in a nice place [Eton Square], but as a football man the most important thing is to be working with the right people and with the right approach to things,” he says.Some say Mourinho’s defining moment was when his Porto team won the Portuguese League cup for the second year running and then overwhelmed Monaco for the European Champions title last May. When I say that, I know many good managers can go 30 or 40 years without this success. I’m aware of this, and because of it I want to enjoy this night.”For many inside football, the key to Mourinho is sheer intellectual power. He is fiercely protective of his family life with his wife of 20 years, Tami, and children Matilde, nine, and Jose Junior, five, something that he underlined in his moment of triumph after the European Cup final in Gelsenkirchen last spring.

Instead of joining his players, he embraced his family and stole off into the night.Later, he spoke of a burgeoning personal empire: “I’ve had great success in winning the Uefa Cup and now the Champions League so quickly, but though I know I’m going to have a bad year sometime, I would be very sad if, in 10 years’ time, these were the only great trophies I have won. Joe Jordan, the coach of Portsmouth, Chelsea’s last victims despite a titanic effort before their own fans, had a superb career as a player with Leeds, Manchester United, AC Milan and Scotland, but this week he acknowledged the force of the man who, in his youth, could only dream of getting in the foothills of such a playing career.Said Jordan: “It was terrible to lose to Chelsea after playing so well, but at the end of the game you had to acknowledge you had been up against something special, something you don’t encounter so often these days. The goal of succeeding in football quite simply took over his life; it became an issue with his mother, who had suggested Jose was wasting his time in a business in which he had no natural aptitude despite all those hours he had spent kicking a football around the orange groves of the family home in Setubal.Now it is as though a veil has been cast over Mourinho. Chelsea have great talent and resources, but you have to admit they have something else, something put there by Jose Mourinho.”No doubt, he was shaped by powerful forces in a youth darkened by the loss of a family fortune – his mother’s wealthy uncle, the owner of canneries in the fishing port of Setubal, was a loser when the socialist revolution unseated the old dictator Salazar – and later he was deeply saddened by the mysterious death of his sister Theresa, who was said to have had problems with drugs. The reality has been quite the opposite, with such as John Terry, perhaps the most dramatically improved player in the English game, Frank Lampard, Damien Duff and the luminous Dutchman Arjen Robben building a mountain of evidence that he does indeed have a rare insight into the dynamics of winning football.In the process, and while building an astonishing aura around himself, Mourinho has demolished the myth that there will always be a barrier between the most talented players and coaches whose own modest achievement has only sharpened their need to win. He then spent two years at Monaco under Ars? Wenger (“he’s a great friend and we still talk a lot”) and alongside Glenn Hoddle (“he was a fantastic player and I liked him a lot as a person”) Diaz adds: “I’m also very close to Sven Goran Eriksson.

Diaz scored the winner for River Plate in Maradona’s last game for Boca “I always used to score against Boca,” Diaz says. “They were always fantastic battles because the clubs are huge rivals. I remember scoring twice against Boca when we won 5-2 – at their ground.”At 23 Diaz left for Italy, where he spent seven years with Napoli, Avellino, Fiorentina and Internazionale, helping the latter to win Serie A in 1989. We’ve only just started and we’ll take things step by step.”One of Diaz’s sons, Emiliano, 21, who has played for River Plate and Cordoba, has been training with Oxford and may be given his chance. His 18-year-old brother, Michael, has also been working with the squad. Diaz says he needs to bring in new players, but insists: “We don’t want to do things too quickly Maybe we can bring something different We might play 4-4-2, we might play 4-3-1-2 It depends on the players We’ll take things step by step. We need to find out what the players can do and then adapt the way we play.”Diaz began his career in Buenos Aires at River Plate at a time when Maradona was emerging across the city at Boca Juniors.