Interview: Joao Moutinho – the joker in Wolves' pack

He may or may not ‘love a vino’, as the Wolves fans sing, but in football terms Joao Moutinho is reminiscent of a maturing fine red wine. He just gets better and better.

When presented with “5ft 7 of football heaven” as the song goes, you might have anticipated a stand-offish, calm, collected customer with an aura of invincibility about him.

So a cheeky rapscallion who plays practical jokes and can giggle like a schoolboy isn’t what this correspondent was expecting.

“This is true – if I get rid of the beard I am 22!” a grinning Moutinho laughed.

“I joke every time. We enjoy what we do a lot and, for me, playing football is the best work in the world. I don’t know how many players or boys want to be in my position.

“I try to live my life with happiness and with a smile on my face. I try to do my best.

“Not big things but things you can smile at. In the shower, we have the hot water so we turn the cold water on so all the players need to run (out).

“It’s to smile and to do something happy every day.

“Of course, (Nuno) does it too. When we need to work, we work. But when we do something he does it with us to be inside of the group. That’s what’s happened here.

“I try every day to be happy and to give what we want with happiness and a smile.”

Moutinho has certainly been putting smiles on the faces of Wolves supporters this year.

The £5million (!) man has enriched both Molineux and the Premier League as a whole with a succession of dominant midfield performances, combining brains and brawn to outstanding effect.

As Conor Coady comments in these pages, Moutinho is ‘special’ and controls entire games with ease. “I bring experience, of course, that is one of the things,” Moutinho says of his role in the Wolves side. “In football we need to be intelligent because sometimes you can have a lot of things but you need to know when to pass and stay with the ball.

“When you go to the counter-attack you need to know all these things about the game.

“I bring this, of course, and I believe I bring my quality to help the team. That is why I try to do at every training session, improve every game and to do my best to help the team.

“For me that is the most important thing, to help the team to achieve their goals.”

Those goals probably didn’t include winning the FA Cup this year, but Wolves are now just two games away from becoming the first club to win the famous old competition in three different centuries.

But Moutinho isn’t phased in the slightest by the prospect of playing in Wolves’ biggest game in a generation.

Ater all, this is a guy to who winning comes naturally. He’s won a European Championship, a Europa League, three Portuguese titles, three Portuguese cups and a French league title.

“Of course every player when they sign for a club wants to win something,” Moutinho said.

“We are in the semi-final but we try to beat Watford. They are a very good team who have very good players and play very well. We try to do our best to get to the final.

“We need to do our best to be focused for this game. If we don’t and think we are in the final, then we already lose.

“We need to think about Sunday as it will be a very tough and hard game.

“Against Watford (in October) we played two midfielders and now we play with three and two in front.

“That is why I don’t know if we have the three ‘we win’ as they did a very good job at Molineux and now we are better and they are better too.

“I think we can beat them but we need to be very focused on the game and them. If we can do that we can win.”

Monaco to Wolverhampton isn’t a well-

travelled path but Moutinho has embraced English life. Predictably the weather is a gripe. But he’s delighted to finally, after two near misses earlier in his career when he almost joined Everton and Spurs, be playing in the ‘best league in the world’.

“Since I started playing as a professional, I have wanted to play in England,” he said “I could have joined Everton or Tottenham before, but things didn’t work out well to come over here.

“It was always one of my objectives, but I came last year and I’m very happy and I’m enjoying this football.

“We have a very good team and a very good group and we try to do our best in every training session and every game, that’s the most important thing for us, to help the team, to help the club to achieve something more.

“I have never had any doubts (about joining Wolves) because I know where I am going, and what players they already had, and I knew we would work hard with the coach to play good football, because they already did it in the Championship last season. They did a very good job, and they were going to buy one, two or three players to add more quality and more experience.

“I think from the first day I came here, I thought we could do something good. Of course, if you’d had said we were going to stay where we are now, in seventh position right now, maybe not. But why not?

“We try to do our best every training session to improve more and more, and that’s what happens when you work at 100 per cent for the team. The weather sometimes doesn’t help but when I came here the people were so kind.

“In Portugal, you sit in traffic and you give someone a space and they say nothing. Here all the people say thank you.

“I think they are very kind and it’s easy to settle here. It’s raining but it’s not so bad.

“It’s good to be here, my family likes it, my daughter loves her school and I love the play here in the Premier League.

“If my family are good I will do my best and think what is only important for me, and at the moment it’s the game.

“I have two girls, nine and three. My oldest wants to play. My wife doesn’t like it too much, but I say ‘if she wants to she can’.

“The (spare) minutes or days I have, I try to enjoy them with my family, with my girls.

“Because it is important to stay with them – Lara and Victoria.

“For me the Premier League is the best league in the world. The football they have for me is fascinating because of all the teams, the atmosphere and stadiums. The football is, of course, a little more aggressive and I say that as a good term, not a bad term.

“There is more contact. I like this. I am small and sometimes I don’t go to the contact but the players need to be intelligent and know what they can and can’t do.

“I try to do my best. But this league is very good and plays very good football. Of course, you have some teams who play the football they think it is better to achieve the points. That is how I see the Premier League.

“I think here the cup competition is more interesting, bigger history than in other countries.

“The English players know more about the FA Cup and they try to explain what is the FA Cup. But it is one more competition. If you put too much importance it is more pressure on you. We don’t need that.”

Nuno Espirito Santo was integral to Moutinho’s decision to join Wolves.

Nuno trusts Moutinho – and that feeling it mutual.

“He is a very good manager and a very good person.

“I think what we do like a player he does like a coach.

“He tries to teach us all we learn. In the last 20 years, he has played. It’s important when a coach plays football and becomes a coach, he knows sometimes what the players need.

“He knows a lot of football, of course the tactics and this kind of thing. He’s a very good coach. But I think the chemistry he tried to put in us is very good, and that’s why we are a very good group and we do all the things we did already.”

While winning the FA Cup would be a momentous and historic achievement for Wolverhampton Wanderers, ambitious owners Fosun hope that whatever happens this season is just an early stage of their journey to the top of English football.

Moutinho shares that ambition. “My ultimate ambition is to win the Premier League as I have never won it,” he said.

“To be serious it is FA Cup if we can. We have a hard game on Sunday. I have never won the Champions League. I was in the semi-final and quarter-final. I won the Europa League.

“I think day-by-day and year-by-year and this year we can win something, it is the Cup and we have a tough game and we need to prepare for that.

“I think we have already had a good season and we could stop here. But we need to try to win every game we have, to get in front.

“Of course the most important one is the next one, Watford, in the semi-finals of the FA Cup, and we will try to do our best.

“We take it game by game, because that’s the most important way to do it. If not, then you can start to think what will happen after this game.

“We need to be focused only on Watford. But we have a group of players who can do something big for the club.”