Revealed: The Phone Call that marred Casillas & Mourinho's relationship at Madrid as both prepare to meet again in UCL

A lot of people don’t still know that all it took was a phone call and the relationship between Former Madrid and current Chelsea boss Jose Mourinho and then Madrid Keeper and captain Iker Casillas was destroyed once and for all.

The Real Madrid legendary goalkeeper was on one end of the line and his Spanish compatriot and Barcelona captain Xavi on the other. 

Casillas had called after yet another Clasico had descended into yet another ugly brawl. He was really angry when the conversation started but his tone seemed to change as the conversation went on with Xavi, who is one of his oldest friends in the football realm, told him that both sides needed to think about the way they were behaving.

The conversation however ended in reconciliation like normal Gentle man stuff. Mourinho being “who he is” was absolutely furious.

However Casillas and Mourinho meet again on Tuesday night in Portugal the Chelsea bosses home country and at the Estadio de Dragao where Mourinho was equally successful and even won the Champions League with in the 2003/2004 final and neither has changed his view of their three seasons together.

‘Iker deserves a lot of credit’ said Xavi in a recent Marca interview. ‘He called me and [Carles] Puyol. I told him that both sides had to look at themselves. He was looking out for the interests of Spanish football.’

For Mourinho it was treachery and I would not blame him as the Portuguese boss has a knack of stirring up issues where there is none and blaming everyone when he loses such a cry baby. He had decided that the only way to beat Barcelona was to make war with them; Casillas had effectively raised the white flag.

Casillas and Mourinho’s antagonistic relationship early in the reign of the Portuguese when arrived at Madrid in 2010.

Casillas had just lifted the World Cup and didn’t like Mourinho’s imposition that Madrid could not match Barcelona by just playing football and but Rugby mixed with kick-boxing.

For Mourinho’s tastes Casillas while a brilliant shot-stopper lacked the physique and personality to dominate his area and his defence. May I recall at this point that this same Casillas prior to Mourinho moving there had been No.1 for the Los Blancos for more than a decade and shattered a lot of records for both Club and Country. But as time went by their differences would go much deeper.

In November of their first season together Real Madrid lost 5-0 away to Barcelona in what Mourinho described as ‘the worst defeat of his career’. When the two teams met again the following April he was more determined than ever to do things his way.

Before the game Marca leaked Mourinho’s team line-up breaking the news that he had pushed defender Pepe into midfield to form a formidable dogs of war trio with Sami Khedira and Xabi Alonso.

The game ended 1-1 but many of the Madrid players hated the tactics, and Mourinho hated what he saw as a breach of trust with someone having leaked the team to the press. 

So began the soap opera of the ‘Madrid mole’ with Casillas, off-message tactically, and with a journalist girlfriend, Sara Carbonero, the chief suspect.

Casillas and Carbonero walk through Madrid together, but their relationship led to Mourinho's mistrust

Madrid beat Barca in the Spanish Cup final and so when they faced each other in the Champions League semi-finals Casillas Captained a group of players who believed that their chance to really win Barca had appeared and he Blaugrana were now there for the taking .

Mourinho had other ideas though. Happy to take a goal-less draw to the Nou Camp in the second leg, he wanted his team to sit-back and “pack the bus”. The plan however broke down when Pepe was sent off and Lionel Messi scored twice. At this point also it is important to note that Madrid has never been a club of that tradition,heritage or culture to defend till death or just sit evident from most of the kind of players they bought so somehow the plan was always doomed to fail.

Casillas was not the only player also to disagree with Mourinho’s tactics Cristiano Ronaldo said after the game: ‘I don’t like to play that way, but I have to adapt to what the team asks from me.’ He was dropped for the next league game but Casillas was still seen as chief subordinate.

In the second leg of a bitterly-contested Spanish Super Cup at the start of the 2011-12 season tensions came to a head with a touchline brawl following a Marcelo foul on Cesc Fabregas and included the moment when tyrant Mourinho poked then Barcelona assistant coach Tito Vilanova in the eye.

Casillas had been as vexed as anyone in the farce seeking out both Fabregas and Xavi but when he saw footage of himself after the game he made the famous phone call to his Barcelona friend Xavi the one that so infuriated Mourinho and probably was the last straw for the Portuguese.

The stormy Super Cups had polarised the supporters. There were those who believed Mourinho was damaging Madrid as a club but others were glad they were now making Barcelona sweat for their supremacy.

Casillas sought out Mourinho in the pair’s second season together to say that for all their differences he would give everything for the team. 

Madrid won the league but were again beaten by Barcelona in the cup with another controversy a Pepe stamp on Messi the enduring image of another unsavoury clash, and they lost to Bayern Munich in the Champions League semi-final.

Tensions were brewing in the dressing room and Mourinho was loosing it as then Captain Casillas continued to be part of a group within the squad who blamed Mourinho’s cautious tactics for these big-match failures. 

He also disliked being told to push a certain line in post-match interviews and resented the access and influence he felt Mourinho’s agent the all powerful Jorge Mendes who equally is Ronaldo’s agent now enjoyed at the club.

The dislike was mutual. In his book ‘The Special One’ prominent Spanish football journalist Diego Torres wrote that: ‘There was a feeling that Mourinho saw him [Casillas] as a grass, a mole, a traitor and an egoist.’

Madrid is a club where senior players have direct access to the president and there were meetings between Casillas and Sergio Ramos and Florentino Perez that Mourinho saw as further demonstrations of disloyalty. 

Casillas also further made his boss so angry by saying in one interview that he possessed the values taught him by of all people ‘Pep Guardiola’.

Ahead of their third and final season together Mourinho felt he had really had it with the Captain who also wielded immense influence on the team and urged the club sternly to buy another goalkeeper. When in December Madrid were 11 points behind Barcelona he dropped Casillas for 26-year-old reserve team keeper Antonio Adan…This was all like normal day-day behind the scences politics.

He was left out again in the next game against Real Sociedad but came off the bench after eight minutes because Adan was sent off as Mourinho continued to cut down his influential status at the Club while also trying to force the boards hand in selling the Madrid Legend. 

Half the Bernabeu cheered him, the other half siding with Mourinho  jeered that was the situation and knowing also the influence that fans at the Bernabeu have especially when it comes to who go’s and stay’s it seemed the boards hands where tied. So it would be for the rest of his career in Spain even beyond Mourinho’s departure.

He lamented in a recent El Mundo interview: ‘The important thing was to get behind the team not make me the centre of attention, but it was the hangover from the previous era.’

When Casillas broke a bone in his hand in that third season Mourinho finally got to sign another keeper with Diego Lopez arriving from Sevilla. 

In one press conference he said: ‘Just as Casillas can say he would prefer another coach such as [Vicente] Del Bosque or [Manuel] Pellegrini, I can say that I prefer Diego Lopez. And while I’m the coach of Madrid, Diego Lopez will play.’

Casillas will meanwhile have another chance to prove Mourinho wrong on Tuesday night who somehow for whatever reason seems to be a thorn in players, coaches even doctors flesh wherever he goes. 

Speaking after the two were drawn together in the Champions League draw he showed how he was still the almost always calm, collected and decisive leader he had been for Madrid for many years saying: ‘I never spoke publicly about him at the time and I don’t think I ever will. 

'People know how it was. In the end we just did not have a good relationship.’