Winning by playing beautifully is often the Holy Grail of sporting performance. Of course like everything that is desire-able in life, winning and playing beautifully both together is often hard to attain. If you had to sacrifice one, which one would you do?
It's a surprisingly tricky question. Because you would think simply achieving the difficult task of winning itself should satisfy all parties with vested interest like players, coaching stuff, fan, owners of clubs, local media etc. But it rarely does.
In the recent over-hyped "Fight of the century" which created a new Pay-Per-View record in USA of $500 million, Floyd Mayweather"s strategy of playing it smart to keep constantly moving and staying away from Manny Pacquiao's brawling style of punches was heavily criticized by a lot of boxing fans as too calculative and safe. Jose Mourinho may be the most successful club football coach of recent times but he is heavily criticized for deliberately playing defensively against big teams in big matches and win with counter attacking style.
In the Champions League final against Bayern Munich, Mourinho's Inter Milan won 2-0 despite having only 33% possession of the ball and having 50% less number of shots than opponent. Even as recent as last month Mourinho, now the coach of recently crowned EPL champion Chelsea, won against Manchester United where the losing team had 71% of the possession where Chelsea scored with his first shot on target in 38th minute. The Mourinho camp usually calls this a stroke of genius who does this trick over and over again, but not everyone is bought over. (except) shammograffity.wordpress.com
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