Iker Casillas and Jose Mourinho appear to have reignited their Real Madrid-era personal feud some three years after the pair parted company.
Mourinho first marginalised and then more or less forced Casillas out of his boyhood club in 2015 amid claims that the goalkeeper was feeding team information to his cronies in the media in revenge for being unceremoniously dropped by his coach. Anybody who lived through it will remember it as the most lukewarm of cold wars.
Interviewed by Argentinian channel Universo Valdano earlier this week, Casillas spoke of his regret at the manner in which his previously imperious Real career gradually dwindled to nothing in the final three years under Mourinho.
If I had continued at Real Madrid, then I would have had a worse ending than I did have.
At that time, I opted to be quiet and I thought that was the way to honour the values of Real Madrid.
I think if it happened all over again, I would take the bull by the horns and face Mourinho.
Casillas also claimed he thought Mourinho “took things too far” by deliberately stoking the more fervent sections of Real’s support base during his tenure, especially when it came to games against Barcelona.
That was crazy. It started to take off to that ‘Madridismo’ level that I never liked. It seemed like there was a political war between Catalonia and Spain.
I’m a Madridista I always want Madrid to win but I’m not going to go to that extreme.
He (Mourinho) was brought in to compete with Barcelona and brought moments of great tension and that ‘Madridismo’ that I mentioned that I don’t like came out, there was a limit that he went to with me that I didn’t want to go to.
Almost inevitably, Mourinho has since exercised his right to reply.
Speaking to Portuguese newspaper Record, the now-Manchester United coach implied that Casillas might just have ever so slightly ret-conned their squabble slightly to suit himself.
When he says he never confronted me he’s not telling the truth. He confronted me and he did it in a way in which no-one does it better than him, secretly.
Basically, Casillas is a snidey little creep with a victim complex and Mourinho is a pompous meat-head.
We’re all still exactly where we were in 2015.