The Premier League demands that its key fixtures become more than just a game of football. If possible, they must be about personalities, not principles. Even the Manchester derby can be boosted by a bit of this stardust.
If the summer was about anything other than spending more than a billion, it was about the acquisition of plot lines, which were desired with the same intensity that the salesmen want good leads in Glengarry Glen Ross.
And there was no greater plot line than the casting of Pep and Jose in the same city, two men destined to meet coming out of Wing’s one night, engage in smalltalk and move in different directions. Even that could be seen as a metaphor.
“I think it will happen naturally,” Guardiola said at his unveiling when he was asked to anticipate the first charged encounter between the pair. “One day I will arrive at a restaurant and he will be there. It will be ‘Hi, how are you?’ He will say ‘Hi’ as well.”
This is not what the rights holders will be expecting from the return of this high concept franchise, this CGI-altered resumption of hostilities between the two men who pushed each other to the limits in Spain, before Mourinho ended up pushing himself to the limits.
Pep left Barcelona worn down by his own obsessive desire for improvement, but pushed there too by the disruptive philosophy of Jose Mourinho, a philosophy he is always ready to fall back on, often because he has no control over it.
Guardiola’s own neurotic obsession may have worn him down anyway as it often does with those afflicted, but Mourinho didn’t help. He never helps.
Come on, guys. You're better than this https://t.co/u18HQYjeSI
— SportsJOE (@SportsJOE_UK) September 8, 2016
Guardiola is temperamentally less interested in these confrontations, but Mourinho may not be inclined to step towards one, not one when he is not sure if he can turn it to his own advantage.
As the season resumes after an international break which came too soon, this game may pass off quietly. Mourinho has started well as United manager, but this may not be the time to be picking fights, certainly with an opponent whose strength he can’t be sure of.
There are still a lot of questions about his own United side and Saturday provides a test which will be tougher than anything his side have encountered so far.
Mourinho only had eyes for United… https://t.co/QH993qIZde
— FootballJOE (@FootballJOE) August 22, 2016
For now, he may stick to the occasional barb at Arsene Wenger and Jurgen Klopp, who lead teams he can be reasonably confident of overcoming this season.
City and Pep are different. There may be a time when he needs to engage, but for now he has enough to learn about his side, despite their 100% record.
Sometimes Mourinho does not do things because he is trying to control the media war, but because he can’t help himself. The coming season will determine if his implosion at Chelsea was a sign of a more permanent decline or just the natural end of a cycle.
Mourinho does endings with more drama than anybody else in football, but as he assumes the high office, as Alex Ferguson referred to the United job, he has done so as if keenly aware of this historical burden.
“I hope to be myself,” David Moyes said when he was appointed and, if Mourinho would never utter a statement as loaded with self-doubt, he will end up becoming himself too.
There might have been some who felt Guardiola would have been the best man to succeed Louis Van Gaal, but once he was appointed at the Etihad, Manchester United had no choice except Mourinho.
The pair were, of course, interviewed for the Barcelona job in 2008. If Guardiola sees himself as teacher, Mourinho has always felt that his role includes being an agent provocateur.
When he was interviewed by Barcelona, he explained that what took place in the media was all part of the game he had to play to create the right spirit for his side.
At Chelsea, in his final season that game seemed to drive some players further from him which would seem to undermine the purpose of the game.
There are plenty of those who would question the wounding nature of the game he plays. Some would wonder if he is aware of the consequences of the game or if he is always in control of the game he plays.
Guardiola might be among them. During that dangerously intense period of four matches in 18 days between Real Madrid and Barcelona in 2011, Mourinho criticised Pep’s reaction to Barcelona’s defeat in the Copa del Rey.
“A new era has begun. Until now there were two groups of coaches. One very, very small group of coaches that don’t speak about refs and then a big group of coaches, of which I am part, who criticise the refs when they have mistakes – people like me who don’t control their frustration but also people who are happy to value a great job from a ref. Now there is a third group, which has only one member – Pep – someone who criticises referees when they get decisions right.”
Guardiola’s response touched on their shared history at Barcelona – “I know him and he knows me” – and their many differences since they went in different directions.
According to Marti Perarnau in his book Pep Confidential, Guardiola felt that his club “had hung him out to dry”.
Sports director Andoni Zubizarreta told him, “we don’t answer back, eh, Pep. We like a low profile.”
This had been part of the criteria when Barcelona went looking for a manager in 2008, but in 2011, on this night, things were different.
“In this room, he is the chief, the fucking man. In here he is the fucking man and I can’t compete with him. If Barcelona want someone who competes with that, then they should look for another manager. But we, as a person and an institution, don’t do that.”
Guardiola had taken Barcelona in another direction, but nobody could avoid being sucked into those wars, certainly not the man leading what may be the greatest team football has ever seen.
Mourinho had been recruited by Madrid to oppose all that, but in the end his wars divided his own dressing room, just as they ultimately did at Chelsea.
Barcelona had once been in a position where they considered Mourinho as an alternative to Guardiola. When United were in that position, instead of Pep as an alternative, they had Ryan Giggs.
Barcelona decided that Mourinho was not a risk they needed to take.
“Mourinho,” Ferran Soriano, then at Barcelona and now CEO at Manchester City, said, “is a winner, but in order to win he guarantees a level of tension that becomes a problem.”
United might have once overlooked him on that basis too, but so much has gone wrong since Alex Ferguson retired that playing it safe was no longer an option.
One day it may become a problem at Manchester United as well and if it doesn’t Mourinho will have become a different person,
For now, he suits Manchester United perfectly as they refashion themselves as a base for Galacticos with a manager who has the most potent brand of all.
“I certainly wish him well,” Sir Alex’s brother Martin told Graham Hunter this week. “While there were some things which, in the past, I didn’t like about him, so long as he’s successful in the ‘United way’ he’ll get my backing. Already I see that some of the behaviour which was a little eccentric at Madrid and Chelsea seems to have dissipated.”
Of course, we have been here before. Mourinho returned to Chelsea in 2013 – when David Moyes had assumed the high office at Old Trafford – and insisted that he had now achieved peace and contentment as he returned to the club he loved.
He delivered a league title, before he was consumed by the old eccentricities, the old suspicions which tend to come on stronger than ever when they appear these days.
Among the eccentricities was using the post-match press conference when Chelsea claimed the title in 2015 to launch an attack on Guardiola or, at least, managers who were “smarter” than Mourinho.
“I could choose another club in another country where to be champion is easier,” he said on that day, and it will be a line of attack that Guardiola may have to deal with until he is successful in England.
Guardiola made his mark on Bayern Munich, but his record in the Champions League while he was there will allow people to say he failed, while others will simply point out that he didn’t succeed as he could have done in a world where luck always plays its part.
At City, he will have the resources to overcome that but his challenges are now internal. The early indications have been encouraging, but Guardiola’s obsessions have always been internal and, as he reshapes a City team which looked nothing like the kind of side he could manage last year, he will be uninterested in the noises coming from elsewhere.
Those noises are muted at this stage, but they will get louder as the season progresses.
Both managers will be happy with a point on Saturday as they attend to their main business. For now, they can’t be distracted by each other. It will change but, this weekend, we should enjoy the phoney peace, even as those who own the franchise insist that this is war.
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