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Modern football was invented in Barcelona in the mid-90s. Of this season’s Champions League quarter-finalists, four sides are managed by players who turned out for Barça in 1996: Pep Guardiola, Luis Enrique, Julen Lopetegui and Laurent Blanc. Within a couple of years, they had been joined by Frank de Boer and Phillip Cocu as well as the coach Louis van Gaal and his assistant Ronald Koeman. In slightly differing ways, the eight are apostles for the Barcelona way – or, more accurately, given the influence of Ajax on that style, the Barçajax way. However, there was another presence there, initially as a translator and then as a coach. In the Barçocracy of modern football, there is a fallen angel.

In the modern world, at least at elite level, José Mourinho stands alone. At the greatest coaching seminar the world has seen, when the game as we know it was shaped, but he did not draw the same lessons everybody else did. The other eight espoused the proactive, possession-based football seeded at the club by Vic Buckingham, developed by Rinus Michels and taken to new levels by Johan Cruyff.


Arsène Wenger, the Martyr of Islington
Read more
Mourinho, however, was different. Mourinho believed in reactive football. He was the outsider, the outcast who now revels in his role as the dark lord. Saturday’s game against Manchester United was typical. Others, playing at home in a match that could effectively ensure the title, might have felt compelled to attack. Mourinho fielded Kurt Zouma, a central defender, in midfield, sitting deep and won the game with 28% possession.

Mourinho may have objected to Diego Torres’s biography of him but the passage describing his methods against the better sides was as true of Saturday’s win as it was of the victory over Liverpool that determined the destination of the title last season:

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1. The game is won by the team who commits fewer errors.

2. Football favours whoever provokes more errors in the opposition.

3. Away from home, instead of trying to be superior to the opposition, it’s better to encourage their mistakes.

4. Whoever has the ball is more likely to make a mistake.

5. Whoever renounces possession reduces the possibility of making a mistake.

6. Whoever has the ball has fear.

7. Whoever does not have it is thereby stronger.

It’s true that earlier in the season, Chelsea were more expansive. When Diego Costa, Cesc Fábregas and Nemanja Matic were fit and in form, they attacked and racked up goals. The talk was all of how, after the regular failures to break down massed defences last season, Mourinho had taken decisive action. As the squad has tired and form has waned, as the finish line has approached, though, he has reverted to type. Chelsea have been struggling for form and consistency all year and yet, in the 12 league games since the 5-3 defeat by Tottenham on New Year’s Day, they have conceded only seven goals and dropped only six points.

There was a concern earlier this season that Mourinho might be losing his touch. Against Manchester City (home and away), United (away), Southampton (away) and PSG (home and away), Chelsea took the lead, sat back and ended up conceding equalisers. It could even have happened on Saturday, Falcao hitting the post with 11 minutes remaining. However, even if Chelsea have been unusually vulnerable at times in a lead this season, Mourinho hasn’t changed – and it could be argued that Saturday was vindication.

From right to left, the then Barcelona manager Louis van Gaal, assistant coach Ronald Koeman, keeper's trainer Frans Hoek and assistant trainer José Mourinho during a friendly in Amsterdam in 1999 Facebook Twitter Pinterest
From left to right: the then Barcelona manager Louis van Gaal, assistant coach Ronald Koeman, keepers’ trainer Frans Hoek and assistant trainer José Mourinho during a friendly in Amsterdam in 1999. Photograph: VI-Images/VI-Images via Getty Images
Anyway, the sense is that it’s not entirely a matter of utility: Mourinho has his sides play that way because he enjoys it. Cast out from Barcelona, overlooked by them when they appointed Pep Guardiola in 2008, he is now the anti-Barcelona, determined, like Milton’s Satan that, “glory never shall his wrath or might; extort from me,” vowing “To wage by force of guile eternal war, irreconcilable to our grand Foe.” Every defensive performance, every win with limited possession, is a blow against Barça.

There’s probably no game Mourinho has enjoyed so much as Internazionale’s Champions League semi-final second leg at the Camp Nou in 2010, when his side, down to 10 men for more than an hour, had only 19% possession and lost 1-0 to win 3-2 on aggregate. Who needs the ball?

Mourinho is not a pragmatist in the way that, say, Fabio Capello is, changing approach according to his players and, where necessary, adopting reactive, defensive tactics. Rather his preferred way of playing is reactive, which is why he sold Juan Mata. He may have been Chelsea’s player of the season in each of the two previous years but he had no place in Mourinho’s conception of football.

The paradox is that if Mourinho really has allowed his philosophy to be defined in opposition to Barcelona – he is that which they are not – then he is still allowing Barcelona to dictate terms, creating a dichotomy where there could be multiplicity. It is not that there is the Barçajax school and Not-the-Barçajax school; it is that the Barçajax school is one way of playing among an almost infinite variety, as represented by Jürgen Klopp, Carlo Ancelotti and Diego Simeone among others.

And that, of course, is testimony to the astonishing influence of Barcelona over modern football. Mourinho cannot escape his upbringing as a coach; even as a rebel, it is Barcelona he is rebelling against.

this one of the reasons,i hate hospitals managed by Nigerian governments...most private hospitals are better than them.

This piece is a hard one for me to write, hard and very difficult. As I write this, I am filled with deep sorrow for what could have been that was not. This piece is not intended to do anything but to warn unsuspecting members of the public. A warning that is necessary at this time because “evil deeds thrive when good men do nothing”

My discourse is centred on the level of mismanagement, inefficiency and a total lack of respect for life exhibited by management and staff of EKO Hospital on Mobolaji Bank Anthony Way, Ikeja.

My friend’s wife, Dolapo, a young mother of 2 boys , with a promising banking career, pregnant with the 3rd child had complained of leg pains to her husband on Tuesday, March 31, 2015. Her husband took her to the EKO Hospital for treatment (their registered HMO provider), they were told that the leg pains were normal for pregnant women at her stage and were subsequently given some paracetamol tablets to use.

Getting home, the pains did not subside, in fact, it grew worse. It got to a point that she could not walk with the legs on her own. The husband had no choice but to return to the hospital on Friday April 3, 2015 at around 3pm when it was obvious things were not getting better. At that point, The doctor on duty advised them to wait for the consultant and Dolapo was made to sit out the ‘’wait’’ in a wheelchair as her legs could no longer support and carry her, in any case the consultant did not show up until Saturday afternoon being 04/04/1. She repeatedly beckoned on the staff on duty to perform a CS and safely get the baby out as she could sense and feel that something was ominously wrong. The pregnancy was well into 8 months. Some scan were recommended and the person to conduct the scan had reportedly closed for the day and only surfaced at about 9pm on Friday and the wait dragged well into the night

Dolapo was in pains on the wheel chair, she was being moved from her ward to the scanning room when the head of the baby came out on the wheel chair, her husband screamed and rushed her quickly into the elevator, yes, ELEVATOR!!. The baby could not stand the trauma, he came out in transit, right there in the elevator. A nurse had to hold the baby’s head, supporting it while the elevator goes to labour theatre, the baby was pulled out before they could make it to the theatre. This was at 9.30pm on Friday. The baby became the centre of attention for the hospital staff of Duty while neglecting Dolapo all alone for more than 1 hr 30 mins while they attended to the baby to revive him.

She was left unattended to, in pains, right there in the theatre. She was eventually moved back to her ward . The consultant eventually turned up around 4pm on Saturday. The husband engaged him and he requested that some tests be done to ascertain what level of treatment or care to give. He was told she (the wife) would be fine and the test results would be ready by Tuesday because of the holidays.

On Sunday, April 5, 2015, at about 8am in the morning, I visited her in the hospital and sat beside her on the bed offering words of encouragements. She was still in pains, and she was hardly audible, she could only answer in nods and made attempts at a faint smile to reassure myself and her husband that she would be fine.

It came as a rude shock when I called the husband at about 12 pm and he was crying profusely, saying Dolapo is lying down lifeless and that I should please pray. I was to say the least devastated, I was asking loads and loads of questions and he kept saying please pray, pray.

I got to the hospital to meet the lifeless body on the bed, she was dead! What happened? How did this happen? Nobody could offer any explanation. There was no doctor around, I asked the nurse on duty and she just said she is dead. I recalled she was eating when I left earlier, how could she have gone from eating to being dead in less than 3 hrs?

The husband told me she was given an injection to suppress the pains on her leg and immediately started gasping for breath, oxygen tanks were brought in to revive her but it was too late. She was gone before anything could be done.

The body was left in the room for more than 24 hours, several prayer sessions were held to bring her back to life. In the more than 24 hrs period after her death, no doctor from EKO Hospital came out to say this was what happened. No personnel came around to ask people to leave the room, the body was not covered nor washed. It was simply business as usual for them.

It was normal for someone to give birth and die? The Medical Director of the hospital did not deem it fit to offer explanation or even try to prevail on the family to leave the body so that necessary medical procedures could be done.

I will leave my readers to ask questions from this write up, perhaps, I am being too expectant, maybe too optimistic about my expectations from a Hospital as reputable as EKO Hospital!

The family has accepted their fate and decided to move on…. But should we move on? Should we just accept this as normal? I was talking to a friend in my office yesterday and was shocked when he informed me that his wife also died in this same EKO Hospital some 6 years back and the same treatment was meted out on him!

Please pass this story around, let people know what is going on, don’t stop until it gets to the right quarters where something could be done to save others and for the doctors and hospitals to be more responsive to their duties of saving lives and not taking lives. Dolapo is gone but who knows who will be next??

All Progressive Congress (APC) presidential candidate, retired General Muhammadu Buhari has scored a total vote of 373, 961 to win Peoples Democratic Party (PDP)'s president Goodluck Jonathan in Benue State.
Jonathan polled 303, 737 in the contest involving 23 local government areas of the state.
Returning officer is Prof. Heward Mafuyai. Results was finally declared at 12:18am today (Tuesday).

53cur3m0d3:
Kindly provide us with evidence of the ones you've come across

Nigerian elections demand big bucks, and many in industry stand to gain. But despite the ostentatious televised giving sprees and cheerleader consortiums, President Jonathan may still find he's scraping the bottom of the (oil) barrel for the funding he needs.

It was the grandest of events even by the standards of Nigerian pomp and ceremony.

More than 200 of the country's plutocrats and their political friends gathered in the Old Banqueting Hall in the presidential villa at Aso Rock on 20 December to raise funds for the ruling People's Democratic Party (PDP).

They simply can't afford to take the risk of snubbing the ruling party
The tables were decked out in festive red, green and white – the party's colours.

At the centre of proceedings were President Goodluck Jonathan, sporting his trademark fedora, and party chairman Adamu Mu'azu in a flowing blue agbada.

Welcoming his guests, Jonathan called the event a "fundraising dinner to help our party". For good measure, he added: "as you all know, a business-friendly party".

Such was the interest that national television channels carried a live feed.

As Jerry Gana, a former information minister turned fundraiser-in-chief, worked the room, businessmen and women stepped forward clutching cheques or promises of cash, claiming to rep- resent entire sectors of the economy.

Bola Shagaya, representing a group of oil and gas companies, contributed N5bn ($27m).

Transport and aviation companies added N1bn, while roads and construction, and food and agriculture put in around N500m each.

The single largest donor was the automobile magnate and chairman of Skye Bank Olatunde Ayeni.

"This is the time for us to show that we love our PDP and we love our president," declared Ayeni.

He went on to announce, on behalf of "myself and my partner", a donation of N1bn and another N1bn on behalf of "our group of friends".

At the end of the evening, smiling broadly, Gana announced that N21bn had been raised.

It was a far more ambitious – and successful – outing than the PDP's first campaign fundraiser in 1999. That raised only N356m, well short of its N500m target.

The bigger ambitions of today's fundraisers, critics say, point to the huge returns on campaign contributions or political investments.

"In Nigeria today, the only trade you can do that can guarantee better returns than oil and gas and telecoms is politics," says Jide Ojo, a former programme manager with the International Foundation for Electoral Systems based in Washington DC.

"When you hear of import waivers, fuel subsidy scams, immunity from prosecution – that's just payback for those who have supported the cause of a [winning] party."

Was it a coincidence that only a day before the PDP fundraiser the government announced the creation of a special bailout fund to allow power companies to pay off their debts to gas suppliers?

Greed of the ruling class

Debo Adeniran, executive director of the Coalition Against Corrupt Leaders (CACOL) does not think so. He says that he sees a strong connection between lavish party payoffs and corporate excess.

"Nigerians are being made to pay for the greed of the ruling class through these underhand dealings. All the companies that took money for the fuel subsidy, none have been prosecuted. Nobody is in jail – nobody in court even."

At the Aso Rock fundraiser, some of the more interesting conversations were off camera.

There was, The Africa Report was told, quiet speculation about whether the PDP – the juggernaut of Nigerian politics since 1999 – could face defeat in the February elections.

Questions were also asked about the absence of some of the corporate glitterati. In the past, Aliko Dangote, Femi Otedola and Abdulsamad Rabiu were among the largest donors to the PDP.

In 1999, a relatively unknown Dangote donated a third of the funds raised at a party dinner for Olusegun Obasanjo's election campaign.

In 2013, Dangote pulled in vice-president Namadi Sambo and petroleum minister Diezani Alison-Madueke to attend the launching in Abuja of his $9bn oil refinery project.

Since then, insiders say, relations have cooled.

Dangote Group adviser Joseph Makoju, who stood in for Dangote at the fundraiser, would not disclose how much the company would contribute but said there were plans for a personal meeting between Dangote and Jonathan.

Dangote is still the richest person in Africa, but his coffers were depleted in recent months as Nigeria's naira lost value with the fall of global oil prices.

Rabiu, who, like Dangote, hails from the northern commercial hub of Kano, announced a donation of N250m at a campaign fundraiser in October 2010.

Now, he is chairman of the state-owned Bank of Industry, a key position in the array of government financing organisations.

Otedola's absence provoked the most comment.

Known as the 'Diesel King,' Otedola made a fortune from importing diesel at subsidised prices for the tens of millions of generators required because of Nigeria's chronically unreliable electricity supply.

Although a close friend and supporter of Jonathan for a decade, Otedola is critical of the government's economic management, according to some associates.

Like many fuel importers, Otedola's businesses have suffered since the government started cutting fuel subsidies in 2012.

Businesses are simply pragmatic, says a political spin doctor working for Jonathan's campaign: "Most of the big companies are contributing to the PDP, I can assure you. They simply can't afford to take the risk of snubbing the ruling party. Of course, I'm fairly sure that many of them will give something to [Muhammadu] Buhari and the All Progressives Congress as a kind of insurance policy."

Bismarck Rewane, who heads a financial services company in Lagos, says there has been a slowly moving kaleidoscope of financiers, from generals, oligarchs, bankers and state governors to fuel importers.

Bankers say the latest big beneficiaries of the PDP government were those companies that had been awarded oil blocks or concessions to run electricity companies under a privatisation scheme.

But, for now, both businesses are problematic.

Oil companies have been hit by the halving of the world oil price, and many of the new electricity companies have picked up huge debts as snags over tariffs and gas pricing have emerged.

They may need government help as much as the ruling party in government needs them.

Despite Nigeria becoming Africa's largest economy last year, these twists in the market may force the PDP to be more frugal.

For the first time since 1999, it did not organise costly primary elections to choose its presidential candidate.

Instead, after high-level soundings with party cadres across the country, Jonathan got the candidacy unopposed.

With the presidential nomination over with little fuss and cost, the party barons turned their full attention to building a campaign war chest.

Companies and politicians have formed themselves into rival gangs of cheerleaders, extolling their willingness to contribute to Jonathan's campaign coffers.

They adopted grandiose titles redolent of patriotic fervour: the Transformation Ambassadors of Nigeria, the Protectors of Nigerian Posterity, the Patriotic Supporters of Good Governance and, more enigmatically, the 2015 Project.

According to one of the many public relations firms hired by the PDP, these fundraising consortia compete to raise the biggest pot of cash and win over the most monied corporate bosses.

Reaching out to more than 60 million voters in 36 states and the federal capital is an expensive business.

The jostling to contribute to Jonathan's campaign started early last year.

The most prominent group is the Transformation Ambassadors fronted by Ifeanyi Ubah, whose Capital Oil was named in the 2012
fuel subsidy scams.

The Transformation Ambassadors sponsored adverts on state television that earnestly compared Jonathan's leadership to that of Barack Obama, Nelson Mandela and John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

It also organised nationwide rallies and a drive to get signatures endorsing the president's bid for a second term.

In September 2014, the group announced that it had collected more than 20m signatures.

Around that time, the ruling party set up a committee to register and screen the almost 7,000 groups it said were supporting Jonathan's bid.

Oduah's aviation ovation

The history of the Neighbour To Neighbour (N2N) group shows the links between fundraising and political office.

In 2011, N2N was the best known and most aggressive group backing Jonathan's presidential ambitions.

It was hugely successful in soliciting massive contributions from state and private companies, mainly due to the forceful personality of Stella Oduah, the brains behind N2N.

Within weeks of Jonathan's election in May 2011, Oduah was appointed aviation minister, one of the most lucrative fiefdoms in the government.

There she stayed until 2013, when parliamentary pressure over her role in a car procurement scandal forced Jonathan to dismiss her.

After the president, the 36 state governors are the most powerful bloc of politicians, and their spending has risen exponentially since the return to civil rule in 1999.

At a fundraiser for Obasanjo that year, the PDP's governors contributed N100,000 each.

At the December 2014 dinner, the state governors donated N50m each.

Jonathan's most vocal supporters include Godswill Akpabio, who is chairman of the PDP Governors' Forum and governor of Akwa Ibom State, Jonah Jang of Plateau State and Gabriel Suswam of Benue State.

Governor power

There is a simple quid pro quo between Aso Rock and governors' offices: they back Jonathan's campaign and they receive a presidential endorsement for a second term.

Only a few independent spirits such as Rivers State governor Rotimi Amaechi have broken away from the PDP.

Civic activists argue the political fundraising system has overtones of criminality. CACOL's Adeniran describes the PDP fundraiser in December as "an exhibition of the high level of insensitivity and moral decadence of the ruling class".

He adds that the donations might come from illegal financial deals. Such suspicions are backed up by the 2013 report of the Inter-Governmental Action Group Against Money Laundering in West Africa, which calls political party financing a common means of money laundering in Nigeria.

There have been calls for the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) to investigate political fundraising, but its spokesman Kayode Idowu says its remit is restricted: "INEC is tracking what the parties are spending so that when they reach the limit we can flag it."

It is up to the Corporate Affairs Commission to monitor company donations to parties, he adds.

Eze Onyekpere of the Centre for Social Justice in Abuja says INEC and the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission have failed to punish breaches of the laws on party funding because they lack political will.

Some of the laws seem deliberately ambiguous, too.

Current laws set a limit of N1m for individual donations to a political candidate but no limits on donations to a political party.

They also set a N1bn limit for spending by a single candidate, but there are no limits on what a party can spend.

This might explain the belated announcement by fundraiser Jerry Gana that the N21bn collected during the December dinner at Aso Rock was absolutely not for Jonathan's election campaign but to pay for the PDP's new headquarters currently being built by Bouygues of France. ●

Go sleep for Third Mainland Bridge ... and behold ... your Passport would fall down from the sky
You have to believe before doing dis ooo

worry359:
Have you reported it to the police?
and got a police report?