Talking Mourinho on Extra Time with Paul Ross

There are some parts of your working life you never quite leave behind.

Sportswriting is one of those for me.

I've spent much of my career telling stories in different forms — journalism, books, speeches, campaigns and communications — but football writing was where a great deal of it began. And lately I've found myself increasingly drawn back to it.

So tonight marks something of a return.

I'll be joining Paul Ross on Extra Time, broadcast nationally across talkSPORT and TalkRadio, to talk about one of football's most fascinating, successful and endlessly discussable figures: José Mourinho.

The timing comes ahead of a new documentary about Mourinho, which is being broadcast tomorrow. I've been invited onto the programme to talk about the man behind the headlines and some of what I discovered while researching and writing my book, José Mourinho: The Art of Winning.

Mourinho has always interested me because there is much more to him than the familiar caricature.

Yes, there is the provocation, the theatre, the press-conference mischief and the extraordinary self-belief. But beneath all that is a serious student of football, an obsessive competitor and, perhaps most interestingly, a manager who has always understood that leadership is about people as much as tactics.

That's part of what made writing about him so compelling.

And it's why, years later, we're still talking about him.

For me, tonight also represents the beginning of something new — or perhaps the resumption of something old.

I'm returning to sportswriting, alongside the other storytelling and communications work I do, and there will be much more appearing here over the coming months: football, books, sport, people and the stories behind them.

Watch this space.