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...
Allowing attacking talents off the leash in the second half exposed a glaring truth about how United should be playingNobody really knows how good Anthony Martial is, or could have been or may yet be. Least of all, you suspect, Martial himself, whose last three years after that lavish £53m transfer from Monaco have been spent in stages of uncertainty, in a team who have meandered through assorted fraught and fragile new dawns.For those ill-disposed to José Mourinho it has been tempting to lump Martial in already as a Salah-to-be, another case of De Bruyne-shock in-waiting, an attacking talent destined to bloom spectacularly away from Mourinho’s heavy air. Related: Maurizio Sarri admits Chelsea in wrong while José Mourinho accepts apology...
Their club’s former midfielder has turned into an effective pundit but his targets need to be more wide-rangingI remember having a discussion at least a decade ago about things you just couldn’t say in a football press box, the kind of stuff that could get you excommunicated from polite society. The opening suggestion was something along the lines of: “So, Paul Scholes. Not that great is he?”Even now I can hear the snorts of rage and the sound of newspapers hurled to the floor. And rightly so. Under current UK law criticism of Scholes is still punishable by anything from a lifetime ban to being stabbed through the ear with a skewer by the Queen while weeping, reproachful children stick...
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...