Seville. Forevermore in the mind of Celtic fans as the place where they turned up in huge numbers and had their hearts broken by Porto, but left with their heads held high.

The man responsible for that heartbreak was a certain Jose Mourinho, who would follow lifting the UEFA Cup that night with a Champions League win with the same team the next year, before going on to have more successes at Chelsea, Inter Milan, Real Madrid and Manchester United.

Martin O'Neill's classic Celtic team took 80,000 fans over to the Spanish city for that final, taking over the streets for days with a party that ended with their ten-man team losing 3-2 to an injury-time winner from Porto.

Jose Mourinho talks with his Porto players during a cooling down session after training at Seville Olympic stadium May 20, 2003.

Since then, the Portuguese manager has never been all that popular with a lot of Celtic fans, but the feelings don't seem to be mutual.

Speaking on The Coaches Voice, Mourinho was talking about how he approached such a huge game with an inexperienced team, but also took the time to remark on the impact the opposing fans had from the minute they arrived in Seville and how hard Martin O'Neill's team made it for them.

He said: "I remember that my question mark at that time was how that group of players were going to face the atmosphere of a European final.

"I was trying to analyse it from the moment we landed in Seville, with everything around the final that was there.


"I had played a European final before that when I was in Barcelona and only my Porto goalkeeper (Victor Baia) who was there with me at that time had that experience.

"Everything around, from when you land, the hotel, the people, the number of fans, the crazy atmosphere in the city, the opposite fans - lets see how these guys are going to react."I felt them reacting in the best possible way.

"And I felt that win or not win, you cannot control, but you can control the way you are going to play. I understood immediately that the boys were ready.

"We were winning 1-0 and then they equalised, then we were winning 2-1 and they equalised again.


"The we go to extra time and its hard. Even for us from the outside its really hard because a final is, in the majority of a career, especially when you are in Portugal, now or never.

"You think that it is a unique occasion. We (couldn't) imagine that 12 months later we were all playing in a Champions League final. So we looked to that match (in Seville) that it was the match of our lives, the match of our career.

"And we were there for that.


"That's why it was an absolutely fantastic final.

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