What makes Mourinho special

Fact one: Lionel Messi is reckoned to be the best player in the world, after scoring four goals as his club, Barcelona, demolished Arsenal the other week. The player who could win the World Cup for Argentina.

Seriously good, then.

Fact two: Jose Mourinho was never good at football. Now he's an old buffer with grey hair. Put him against Messi in a one-on-one match in the gym and there's only one winner.

Fact three: on Wednesday, Mourinho reduced Messi to near-impotence and beat Barcelona, the world's best club team.

Mourinho gave up playing as a bad job and did so early. He coaches Inter Milan. He is going where the greatest player cannot follow, the final of the Champions League. A great coach has beaten a great player.

What does a coach bring to a sporting operation that a mere player can't? He operates in three areas simultaneously.

The first is strategy. In club football, that's acquiring and offloading players and developing the chosen style of football. Mourinho is doing that at Inter.

The second is tactics - the decision on the way each match should be approached, who should play and what assignments they should take on.

Inter's two-leg semifinal against Barcelona was a tactical masterclass. The first leg in Milan, which Inter won 3-1, involved two separate game plans, each scrupulously carried out.

The second leg was always going to be defensive and Mourinho's tactics worked triumphantly. Barcelona were restricted to four chances, Messi to just one.

Of these chances, Messi's was brilliantly saved, another was muffed, one produced a goal and the last a goal that was disallowed for a rather unlikely handball.

Mourinho's skill was in restricting his opponents to those four chances - luck bore a part in what came of them, often the way of things in football.

Strategy, yes, tactics, yes. But there is something else.

There is the third area of expertise - the talent that lies beyond the scope of definition.

The existence of this elusive third way was summed up for me for all time when I asked for directions in India: "Continue until the road divides. Then take the central bifurcation."

Trying to pin down the essentials of the central bifurcation is like the ancient experiment in weighing the soul.

A dying person was set on a bed that was also a weighing machine, so that the instant he died, it registered the sudden decrease in weight as his soul left his body.

The reason Mourinho's long-term strategy and his short-term tactics bore fruit so spectacularly in the two matches against Barcelona came down to that third element.

To defend for an hour with 10 men is a hard task; to do so against the best club side in the world is all but impossible.

It required great tactical organisation and great fitness. But it also required a great willingness.

Inter won because Mourinho's players were willing to run themselves into exhaustion to bring off a battle plan they totally believed in.

Only at the end, when they were knackered, did Barcelona get close to them.

That willingness, that soul, that spirit was ultimately the difference between the sides - that, and the iffy handball, the slice of Napoleonic luck.

And that spirit, that third thing, is the work of the coach.

It is not analysable, but let's try to do so. We can perceive the hand of the coach in many of the great success stories in sport.

Sir Alf Ramsey's coldness frightened people. It was not a device to cover up weakness. If anything, it covered up strength - he was an implacable man.

During the 1966 World Cup - which he and England won - there was a move in the FA to force him to drop Nobby Stiles in the wake of an outcry after the match against France.

Ramsey just said that if Stiles was dropped, he would resign.

The point is that no one thought he was bluffing. Because he wasn't. And it wasn't that he had calculated that the FA would back down.

Rather, he was standing up for his team against the world. That is what great coaches do. It is the one absolutely essential aspect of mutual trust.

The FA backed down, and that led to Ramsey's finest moment. As despair hit with West Germany's equaliser in the final, Ramsey told his team as they prepared for extra time: "You've won it once. Now go out and win it again." This was the inspiration his team needed. Ramsey told them, his team believed.

Clive Woodward was England's head coach in 1998, when they played New Zealand, Australia and South Africa in a month, five years before his triumph in the Rugby World Cup.

On the final leg, England checked in to a hotel in Cape Town that was unsatisfactory. So Woodward took the squad to a better hotel and slapped his own credit card down on the reception desk. Trust could hardly have been more solidly established.

Sir Alex Ferguson, of Manchester United, is one of the most successful coaches in club football. Fear is his best-known managerial method, but trust makes his method work.

Us against the world, and I'll see you through. The point here - the point with most great coaches - is that it doesn't matter what happens objectively. What matters is what you believe is happening.

Trust, then, trust and belief. Together they are the founding principle of the coach's art, the defining characteristic of the central bifurcation.

Strategy and tactics, they're the basics, and don't leave home without them.

But it is in the third element that you find the difference between coaches - what allows a great coach to beat a great player. The third element is the special one. - ©The Times, London