Former Chelsea captain John Terry has revealed how Jose Mourinho perfectly exploited an unknown rule to see out games.
Terry had two spells playing under the legendary Portuguese manager at Stamford Bridge, winning three of his five Premier League titles in that period.
The two had a brilliant relationship and Terry has regularly talked about Mourinho's genius managerial abilities.
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And in a recent appearance on beIN Sports during the World Cup, Terry produced another gem of a story relating to a rule that even referees weren't aware of.
Mourinho is known for having a win at all costs mentality and someone who very much enjoyed the dark arts of the game.
And according to Terry, Mourinho had a genius strategy for wasting time if his side were winning 1-0 in a cagey affair.
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He would instruct both Terry and Cahill to lightly bump into one another and go down.
In one instance the referee had told the pair to go off the pitch before coming back on. But Mourinho made his players aware that the rule meant both couldn't go off and that was relayed to the officials.
"Just to win. Didn’t care about anything else, he did anything to get an edge,” Terry said on beIN Sports when asked what Mourinho wanted from his players.
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“I remember, the rule was, if we were 1-0 up and the ball got delivered into the box…if two defenders went up together and both went down on the floor after, you didn’t have to go off the field of play.
“So last 10 or 15 minutes, he would sit me and Gary Cahill down and go: ‘when the ball comes in the box, make sure you both go down - bump into each other and both go down because you can’t both go off.
“We’d never heard of that rule ever. So ball comes over in the last 10 minutes, head it away, Gaz goes down and I think ‘I better go down’. So I dropped to the floor and the ref said ‘you two off the pitch’. I said ‘no that’s not the rule, ask the linesman’.
"Mourinho was so far ahead with those little bits and you’re talking small margins and the best managers find those little margins. Incredible.”
Mourinho's way of things has been much-maligned and he has frequently been accused of being negative and "parking the bus" during his coaching career.
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However, Terry says that wasn't always the case and he liked his team to be free-scoring on occasion.
He added: “If we were two or three goals up at half time against certain teams - Spurs being one of them - he’d say ‘go and kill them, go and make them suffer today.”
Featured Image Credit: Alamy & beIN SportsTopics: John Terry, Chelsea