JOSE MOURINHO watched the same game as me at Wembley on Saturday.
Yet his assessment of what took place and mine are wildly different.
He praised his players and said they could do no more, while suggesting that Chelsea won with route one, predictable football.
He was right that Chelsea weren’t that great, which makes my view on his team’s performance all the more damning.
Chelsea won without playing well in what will go down as one of the more forgettable FA Cup finals.
Manchester United were awful, plain and simple.
This was an inexplicably bland performance in a match that meant so much.
How can a team with so much talent in it produce such slow, plodding, average football?
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It will be interesting to see whether Paul Pogba and Romelu Lukaku are the same players with their country this summer at the World Cup, as they were for their club yesterday.
It was a day for Pogba to stand up and be counted. And he went missing — again.
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As he has done so many times this season.
I look at a player like Alexis Sanchez and wonder what happened to the player I saw at Arsenal, the one that the two Manchester clubs fought over for his signature.
I look at Marcus Rashford, 20, and remember all the youthful zeal and promise that we saw 18 months ago.
Now we see a player with slumped shoulders who is short on confidence. And don’t come back to me with that age-old excuse he hasn’t had a decent run of games.
He hadn’t had when he made his Premier League debut, when he started and scored twice against Arsenal.
So that didn’t seem to hold him back then. This United looks to me like a group of players that are scared to try anything, to take a risk.
Scared to do something that will make a difference.
Too often their play is slow and sideways.
Stamford Bridge boss Antonio Conte could have played any combination of players in his back three yesterday.
Because it would not have made any difference, as they were not asked any questions.
I have defended Mourinho in the face of criticism from elsewhere this season.
But after the evidence of Saturday, some of it is warranted.
The voices of dissent will grow loud in the stands of Old Trafford next season if this style of play continues.
Set against the open, expansive and entertaining football being played by their biggest rivals in Manchester City and Liverpool, it makes the lack of entertainment produced by this Mourinho side all the more stark.
It is not that they haven’t got the players, it’s as if they haven’t got the belief.
They are like a team playing in deep-sea divers’ boots the way they go about their work.
This Chelsea side were there for the taking.
They had just been taken apart 3-0 by promoted Newcastle.
They looked like a rudderless group of players who knew their manager was on his way out.
Yet cautious United set up against them in the first half as if they were playing Barcelona in their pomp.
How could it take 45 minutes in an FA Cup final for a club like Manchester United to wake up and realise the importance of the occasion that they were involved in? They had a decent 20 minutes in the second period and that was it.
If all those players are being honest with themselves this morning, looking back on that game, they will say to themselves they could have done better.
Now you can maybe get away with that if it is one or two.
But not, as United found out, when it is the whole team.
When it is in a cup final as well, it is unforgiveable.
People will say the club needs to invest more this summer to get better players in.
But the side that Mourinho fielded on Saturday should still have had enough to win.
It does not matter who you buy if they are then reduced to that kind of, and level of, collective performance.
Mourinho is too good a manager to oversee that.
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