Whether results are good or bad, we fixate on the idea that managers are accountable for what happens on the pitch. But how much can they really change after the whistle blows?This weekend, in keeping with most others, a much-scrutinised if seldom enlightening ritual will have been enacted once more: the post-match managerial interview. It’s a strange phenomenon, if you think about it, but coverage of a football match without quizzing the manager at the end would now seem as unnatural as the police not questioning the prime suspect in a crime.It has become an integral part of the mechanism that bestows upon managers a position somewhere between a god and a fool, depending on the result. But once a...
Manchester United seem incapable of doing the thing José Mourinho’s teams are renowned for so the manager must change his approachThere are times when you wonder whether the gods of football have almost too pronounced a sense of irony. Not content with a script that pitted an under-pressure José Mourinho against a series of ghosts of his past (Manuel Pellegrini, Rafa Benítez and Chelsea lining up like the conspirators around Julius Caesar, with Juventus, a club he clashed with repeatedly in Italy and now bolstered by his agent’s most high-profile other client, to come), they have devised a new torment for their plaything: his teams have become incapable of doing the thing he was renowned for getting his teams to...
Manchester United’s trip to face Maurizio Sarri’s Chelsea offers a clash of styles on and off the pitch and starts a defining run of matches for Mourinho One reason put forward to explain why the great plague did not just keep on ravaging the human race forever is that it ran out of people to kill. The vulnerable succumbed. Those who were resistant grew stronger. Meanwhile the plague remained the same, stuck in its old plague ways, scowling on the periphery, reduced to the odd destructive burst.There are of course many points of difference between José Mourinho’s approach to winning at football and the bubonic plague. But like the great plague Mourinho’s voracious early success has been followed by a...
The Manchester United manager has been charged by the FA for using ‘abusive, insulting or improper language’ but it seems reasonable to raise the question: was it really offensive?In this week’s episode of the José Mourinho show the Manchester United manager could have another sentimental return to Stamford Bridge ruined by the threat of a touchline ban for swearing in Portuguese.The Football Association has charged the Premier League’s most accomplished attention seeker with the use of “abusive, insulting or improper language” after he apparently repeated the phrase “fodas filhos de puta” into the TV cameras following United’s late win against Newcastle. Related: José Mourinho charged with improper conduct after Newcastle match Related: José Mourinho complains he is being blamed for...
Beating Newcastle lifted the spirits at Old Trafford but Mourinho’s defence will soon be tested by some of the bestAll that speculation over José Mourinho’s future subsided pretty quickly, did it not? There cannot really have been much of a crisis at Manchester United if a single last-gasp win over a team in the bottom three has made everything hunky dory again, though once the uneasy international break truce is over the matter will be put to the test at the weekend.United’s next three opponents are Chelsea, Juventus and Everton, a bit more of a challenge than Wolves, Derby and Newcastle, and it is not inconceivable based on recent form that they might struggle to win any of those games....