Hot Take Vault: Jose Mourinho Might Be Trash Now
The Special One can’t seem to solve the riddle that is Man United, and he’s not really taking it well either.
I remember playing FIFA as a kid. The older version where players still looked like disfigured Lego blocks and there were like only three options to score the ball, all of which had to be inside the penalty area anyways. I remember my friend being better than me at FIFA, always picking a team with pacier wingers and threading through balls through my back line with such ease I should have put down the controller and walked away. Actually, I should have taken the controller with me and buried it in the middle of a desolate field near Chernobyl. After each score he celebrated, and if there were people in the room he’d turn to them and grin. At one point I grabbed his controller and smashed that shit on the ground because I was down 3–0 and he was just doing skill moves to stunt on me. I was on some childish shit back then, because of figuring out where I went wrong I wanted to blame him for something. I’m 27 now and I don’t do that foolishness anymore. Mourinho is 53. He’s still on some childish shit.
Following a 4–0 result against Chelsea, that can only be rightfully described as a shellacking, United are in crisis. Or at least the British media want you to believe they are in crisis. Over the past two match days, the Red Devils aren’t the only team to drop points. City, once comfortably perched atop the table are tied with both Arsenal and Liverpool at 20 points and Pep Guardiola is in a stretch of five games without a win for the first time since 2009 (let me repeat that because I don’t think it’s adequate to describe an absurd statistic like LeBron nearly averaged a triple double in the finals or PEP HASN’T HAD A STRETCH OF MORE THAN FIVE GAMES WITHOUT A WIN FOR 7 YEARS). Arsenal and Tottenham both rolled out two weeks worth of draws against less than inspiring opposition. The only team that’s seen any sort of comfort is Liverpool, who are now in third. So it would be unfair to focus entirely on United, but karma is an unforgiving mistress, so here we are.
For years now, United fans have chosen to deride the Liverpool faithful in the fact that they live solely in the past. You can’t really blame them because the more recent history at Anfield reads like a barely mitigated disaster. A mix of disastrous positional experiments and a habit of letting your top strikers go for exuberant amounts of money. You know how the Lakers fans talked more about the Showtime Era or the Shaqobe days this year than they did about why the hell Byron Scott is not playing D’Angelo Russell and developing the future? That was Liverpool. Now it seems to be United’s turn.
Based on both results and form, the more historic Manchester team has been on a downward slide into becoming effectively an upper-half mid-table team. A team rich with history and consistent performance milestones is now a stepping stone for a variety of others, despite having a roster lush with talent (or at least perceived talent as proportionate to player acquisition fees). On paper, this is still a very good team that should rightfully be where they are, but something is not right on the pitch.
Despite an overwhelming amount of talent the question marks are way too much right now. Who is the second striker should anything happen to Ibra (proceeds to knock on wood until the knuckles are bloody to the bone and there is a hole in his desk)? What is the best calibration of the midfield that frees up Paul Pogba to be a dynamic tornado of long limbs terrorizing the opponents middle? Can this team defend? If there is ever a Rooney statue commemorating his first-touch, how many meters away should they place hte ball?
In many ways you can tell Jose has made some adjustments. He has got most of the defensive tactics spot on (Chelsea drabbing notwithstanding), as evident with a game against Liverpool. He has brought his ability to take a marquee double-header event and turn it into a C-SPAN program to one of the worlds most expensive teams and has specialized in parking multiple buses. However, the team seems uninspired going forward.
Part of that is lack of knowledge what to do with Paul Pogba. At Juventus, he was at his best unleashed up the field and freed from any nuisance such as structure. He was never the most organized player and benefited greatly from presence of Vidal, Marchisio and Pirlo. Two box-to-box players with a frantic work ethic of Charlie Sheen on cocaine and a passing maestro who’s passing made defensive gaps of 5 inches look like the Grand Canyon. So far, United have toyed with Fellaini (neither of those qualities), Rooney (I don’t even know what his most marketable soccer skill is anymore), Mata (good, but needs to be high up to be effective) and Herrera (probably the best fit next to Pogba at the moment) to try and fill that gap, with little to no effect. And that’s the problem with Mourinho’s teams.
Even when he has the talent, he often fails to utilize it offensively. His preference for 1–0 wins over 4–1 demolitions is evident in his philosophy and teams have been willing to exploit that since the latter days at Real Madrid. Instead of trying to break through Madrid’s back line that stood pat like it was defending Helm’s Deep and then getting pegged on the counter by a locomotive and a human torpedo in Ronaldo and Bale, it was wiser to simply cede possession and dare those teams to do something. Now granted, allowing Ronaldo to have possession is much like walking into a cage with a starved tiger, but it worked. Comparative to all the talent, Mourinho team’s do not appear particularly adept at going forward when given the possession.
At what point do we start to consider that maybe he’s just not a brilliant offensive tactician? Once again, I am reticent to put all of the blame on Jose, but I will. He has driven his entire career narrative as the Special One to this very moment, the moment where the tables finally turn. You can’t be on top forever. Even the 73 win Warriors blew a 3–1 lead.
Despite being blessed with an embarrassment of riches at virtually every level (except arguably Porto where his style made much more pragmatic sense than anywhere else since), Jose insisted that those teams were about him. His on/off pitch antics and interviews left no shadow of a doubt who Mourinho credits as the source of Mourinho’s success. He insisted that it was his tinkering and tactical acumen that brought the trophy’s, after all they followed everywhere he went. Well, now he’s finding out that coin has a flip side to it.
Now, the losses are on him too, partially because the competition is so much better. The Premier League this year is not simply the world’s biggest dormitory of football talent per square inch (although the 3 best players in the world are still in La Liga), it also managed to hoard the world’s best managers under one umbrella, and tactical scrutiny is the name of the game. Everyone schemes, everyone exploits weaknesses, and Mourinho’s seems to be a lack of a cohesive offensive identity. He can try and divert the discussion to somewhere else, something as inconsequential as on field celebrations (although coming from a man who once ran onto the field one finger up in the air in jubilant celebration even that comes off as disingenuous), but eventually it all comes back around on one man, the one setting the line-up.
Pep Guardiola remains a constant tinkerer. Klopp and Pochettino are the advocates of the new high-pressure football that makes you wonder if their players basically bathe in Redbul before matches. Conte, for all of his defensive capabilities has shifted the Chelsea lines into a 3–5–1, a tactic that doesn’t have much history of success in England, but seemed to work fine against united. Even Arsene Wenger has went against a lot of his principles, putting Sanchez up-front while also being open to ceding possession for a more defensive tactic in important match-ups (see 2–0 win against City last year). The onus is now on Mourinho to adjust and perhaps admit that the tactic that won him so many things years ago is not work. After all, it’s not many years ago anymore.
