The United way.
When Jose Mourinho joined Manchester United as manager, there was a select group of people saying that he was born to manage the club. He was, they said, the ideal man to pick up the pieces from the poor tenures of David Moyes and Louis van Gaal and return to the club to “the United way”.
Forget the often stodgy football seen during his spells at Chelsea, Real Madrid and Inter Milan, managing at the Theatre of Dreams, they theorised, would unlock something in the manager and give his teams the freedom to play the style of football they were always born to play.
What is the “United way”, you ask? Simply put, it is good football, or at the very least preparing your team to take their chances and capitalise upon the opposition’s weaknesses.
It was a style of play and a mentality which was perfected under Sir Alex Ferguson and lionised since his retirement which meant that, regardless of the score, United were rarely out of a game.
Even if they were losing going into the final minutes teams, fans and pundits knew what to expect: attack. The greatest example of the “United way” is their 1998/99 Champions League win over Bayern Munich but, in truth, the entirety of Ferguson’s final season was played with similar intensity and gay abandon.
18 months into the Jose Mourinho’s reign at Old Trafford and any suggestions that the Portuguese manager would bring about a resurgence of the “United way” seem a long way away.
Wednesday night was an example of why this is the case, but one could have their choice of dozens of United games since he took over, if not the majority.
Mention after mention https://t.co/mJHHrEocz5
— FootballJOE (@FootballJOE) February 21, 2018
Rather than place trust in his expensively assembled squad in the way that Ferguson did, Mourinho seems insistent on playing a style of stale, reactive football which went out of date long ago.
He possesses a squad containing the likes of Romelu Lukaku, Alexis Sanchez, Marcus Rashford, Anthony Martial, Juan Mata, Paul Pogba and Ander Herrera, yet lines his side up as if it was a mid-table League One side.
He has talent at his disposal which most managers would only dream about, yet continually drives fans to sleep with a style of football light years behind the likes of league rivals Spurs, Liverpool and Manchester City.
All of this suggests that rather than finding his spiritual home at a giant like Manchester United, Mourinho has found himself paralysed by fear, regressing back to the same style of play which he has consistently deployed during trying times at his previous teams.
Such tactics may have been sufficient in the past, or at other clubs with an identity less tied up in a particular style of football, but at a club like Manchester United it will (or at least should) be his undoing.
The question is, do United fans care? I’m not sure; the club is second in the league table, remains in the FA Cup and sits prettily to progress to the Champions League quarter-finals, at least..
As it stands, Mourinho may well be the man to return success to Old Trafford, but it’s unlikely he’ll do so in the way many had hoped.
