Imagine this. You are the coach of one of Europe’s biggest team and you are preparing them for a huge game.
A match were well-planned tactics and pre-match preparation wins it all, you were not sure whether one of the opposing team’s star players was playing because his almost identical brother had you confused as to who is who.
This happened to Jose Mourinho. According to John Cross of The Daily Mirror, the Chelsea boss’ game plan for their clash with Manchester United was nearly ruined when he was wrongly informed that Marouane Fellaini would not be playing.
The Belgian midfielder has been a revelation this season, emerging as an integral figure in the Red Devils’ resurgence in the league, forcing the Special One to plan ahead on isolating the 27-year-old and preventing him from influencing the game.
However, all of this was almost undone when the doorman at the Chelsea hotel mistook his brother, Mansour Fellaini, for the Manchester United ace when he came to pick up tickets for the game from Eden Hazard.
So serious was the issue that the Portuguese boss had to take to everyone’s favorite search engine Google to reach the bottom of this matter before hitting the pitch.
Marouane Fellaini's brother made José Mourinho panic, when he turned up in the team hotel to get tickets from Hazard. pic.twitter.com/920bDwCEw0
— Kristof Terreur (@HLNinEngeland) April 20, 2015
Jose said: “I came down in the morning and the doorman said, ‘Fellaini isn’t playing.’
“The doorman asked him, ‘What do you want here?’ He said, ‘I’m Fellaini and I’ve come to get tickets from my friend Eden Hazard.’
“Didn’t smell well for me. I go to Google on my phone and I put in Fellaini brother. The guy is the same.
“So I go with the pictures to the doorman. I say, ‘This one or this one?’ He looks, ‘This one.’
“‘F--- off, he’s the brother.’”
Marouane Fellaini went on to start the match, but the Blues eventually won the Stamford Bridge encounter 1-0.
Thank God for Google!
