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They spent New Year’s Eve in Middlesbrough queuing not to gain entry to a nightclub but for a ticket to the Championship’s biggest match of the season.
Middlesbrough v Derby today brings the division’s two best and highest-spending clubs into collision. It is a pressure game, although the two managers know pressure is a relative term. Once you have walked the corridors of Real Madrid, where every result is pored over, every training session analysed, every gesture “interpreted”, nothing is quite the same again.
Middlesbrough’s Aitor Karanka and his counterpart at Derby, Paul Clement, are both young managers (42 and 43 respectively) who took very different paths to their place on the bench.
Karanka’s playing career encompassed winning three European Cups with Real Madrid while Clement’s rose no higher than Corinthian Casuals, as he decided to specialise very early in youth-team coaching. And yet they will always have the Bernabeu, where both were assistant managers, one to Jose Mourinho, while Clement sat beside Carlo Ancelotti.
Clement, you suspect, had the easier time of it. Mourinho’s reign as manager of Real Madrid was a messy, bitter affair, marked by a feud with Iker Casillas, the captain of Spain’s World Cup-winning squad, banished to the substitutes’ bench at Real.
Reading The Special One, an account of Mourinho’s time at Madrid by the El Pais journalist, Diego Torres, brings his last few disastrous months at Chelsea to mind.
As Real prepared for Mourinho’s last act – the Copa del Rey final with Atletico – Torres wrote: “A witness from within the Valdebebas training ground described the appalling situation. The players did not mind losing because it meant that Mourinho lost.”
The final was duly lost and it proved tortuous for Karanka. When Mourinho was sent off, it might have been expected that his assistant took charge of tactics. Instead, Pepe, Real’s Portuguese centre-half, who had been dropped for siding with Casillas in the civil war, came down to the touchline to bark instructions. On the final whistle, Karanka had to lead the team up to get their losers’ medals.
He was appointed by Mourinho because as a former player he would appeal to the club’s old guard, some of whom might have been uncomfortable that Mourinho’s agent, Jorge Mendes, appeared to be part of the back-room staff.
Throughout it all, they formed a very close bond, so much so that Mourinho provided advice before Middlesbrough entered the play-offs last year, and watched them take on Brighton on his first public appearance since his dismissal at Stamford Bridge.
When Karanka and Clement went into management on their own, both men had tricky inheritances. Clement succeeded Steve McClaren, whose roots with Derby ran deep, while Karanka took over from Tony Mowbray, an immensely popular figure on Teesside who had captained the club through their darkest moments following bankruptcy in 1986.
As a Basque, Karanka would be attuned to regional differences. He dedicated the League Cup win at Manchester United to the steelmen who had lost their jobs at Redcar and demanded the team perform for Alastair Brownlee, a local-radio commentator stricken with bowel cancer.
Clement’s relationship with Ancelotti has run through three clubs – Chelsea, Paris Saint-Germain and Real. However, he admitted his “knees began to shake” when he was first invited to the Bernabeu.
Ancelotti’s great skill is soothing vast egos, and if Clement knows how to deal with Zlatan Ibrahimovic and Cristiano Ronaldo, you suspect he can cope with anyone. Clement particularly admired Ancelotti’s work in the classroom with a flip chart and tactics board and, when Real went in at half-time, Clement would put himself in the manager’s position, wondering what he would say in the dressing room.
It was often the opposite of what Clement would have predicted. When he was offered the Derby job, Ancelotti was one of those he called for advice.
At Real Madrid, Clement helped win what the club most craved, La Decima – the 10th European Cup. Karanka picked up his loser’s medal at the end of an embarrassing Copa del Rey final. But what they now desire most is an older and rather more beautiful trophy – the Football League Championship.
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