John Mortimore

John Mortimore was born in Farnborough, Hampshire, on 23 September 1934 and died on 26 January 2021. A tall centre-half, he joined Chelsea from Woking and played 279 games for them between 1956 and 1965, winning the League Cup in his final season, before a year at Queens Park Rangers. He moved into coaching at Chelsea and Southampton, managed Ethnikos Piraeus and then Portsmouth in 1973/74, and came to Benfica in the summer of 1976.

His two spells are distinct. The first ran from August 1976 to 1979 and began with the championship of 1976/77. The following season produced one of the strangest campaigns in Portuguese football: Benfica went through all thirty league matches unbeaten, scoring 56 and conceding eleven, and still finished second, Porto taking the title on goal difference. He returned in 1985 and won the Taça de Portugal and the Supertaça in 1985/86 and then the league and cup double in 1986/87, his last match coming on a North American tour in June 1987. Over 208 matches he won 146, a rate of seventy per cent that is among the best in the club's history.

He was an English coach of the organised, defensively sound school, and his 1977/78 side in particular was built on a back four that conceded almost nothing, but he adapted to Portuguese habits rather than imposing his own and was liked for it. Afterwards he coached Real Betis and Belenenses, then went back to Southampton, where he served as a coach, as joint caretaker manager in 1994 and eventually as club president.