Football isn’t unique in blindly following trends. The world is full of people wholly committed to a practice until the world decides to do the exact opposite and everybody changes with them. We like to be wrong together rather than run the risk of being alone, even if we think we might be right.
Football is especially prone to groupthink from playing three at the back in the 1990s to appointing directors of football or laughing at the jokes of Ian Holloway.
When David Moyes took the Sunderland players to the Nissan factory last week, it seemed like the gesture of a politician and therefore an indication of how desperate things were at the club.
Moyes had explained the purpose of the visit in terms that were hard to dispute. “We are trying to get closer to the community, we need them. We know a lot of the people in this region are factory workers, we know the level they work at. We want to get back to engaging with the people in the villages and so on.”
The visit was described by one paper as “the second piece of good news for the plant’s workers this week, after Nissan announced it is staying in the north-east despite Brexit”. Some might have wondered if it was only Newcastle fans who would see it as good news, a chance to mock their colleagues who were Sunderland fans.
When the Sunderland group visited, there were photo-opportunities and the kind of comparisons that are usually made when a politician visits a factory.
“You need to concentrate and get it right,” Kevin Ball, former player and manager, who was among the club party, said as he explained the similarities between football and making cars. “If you don’t get it right, it goes wrong further down the line. They understand the importance of of making sure their part in the team is right.”
Following Sunderland’s first league win of the season at Bournemouth on Saturday, many other clubs may now be making a similar visit, even if, given the obliteration of the manufacturing base in England, they may have to settle for a trip to their local microbrewery or maybe a farmers’ market.
After the game, Moyes remarked that their trip had shown them that “it’s much better being a footballer than it is working in a factory”, a statement which again suggested that as a politician, he will never be confused with a populist demagogue.
Moyes may have seemed believable again on Saturday as he talked about the spirit within the group, but it is still hard to be persuaded by him. Some may think that there is a cult forming around a manager like Pep Guardiola, but there are worse things for a manager, among them no longer being plausible.
There is no finer truism in football than ‘a manager needs time’. There is no more pressing reality in football than the knowledge that he won’t get it.
In the past, Jose Mourinho has dispensed with this conventional wisdom. When he arrived at Chelsea, it was said that it was unheard of for a manager to win the title in his first season, so the club, which had finished second the year before, should prepare to plateau. Instead they won the league by 12 points.
Mourinho’s reputation was built on this extreme urgency which distinguished him from specialists in failure, who would build and build towards a future point which may or may not come.
The future was here when Mourinho walked into a club, but if it has arrived at Manchester United it is a dystopian and unpleasant land.
At Chelsea and Inter Milan, he took clubs that were heading in an upward direction and accelerated everything. The speed at which Antonio Conte is restoring things at Stamford Bridge ,with Eden Hazard central to it all, is a reminder of how Mourinho used to be. Sometimes time has nothing to do with it. Sometimes time just makes things worse.
Conte has quickly established that he is worth believing in as a manager at Chelsea, while Mourinho can only point to his record in the past, while the present remains dark and unconvincing.
After Manchester United lost to Fenerbahce on Thursday night, Paul Scholes said Manchester United had “depressed” him for some time, although this was not a surprise, like hearing that Eeyore felt things weren’t going to turn out well. He added that Mourinho needed four transfer windows to get things right at Old Trafford.
Mourinho needs time, but Mourinho doesn’t do time. The clock is always ticking. It was said of the England batsman Trevor Bailey that he didn’t alway bat as if there was a crisis, but he always batted as if there was one round the corner.
Mourinho manages now as if always trying to escape a crisis of somebody else’s making. If it is not the fault of the manager who came before him or a conspiracy of some kind, the players are simply capable of implementing his commands or absorbing the lessons he has taught them.
The players are letting him down, as they let him down in his final season at Chelsea when he managed as if there was a crisis and soon enough it arrived and brought him down.
Conte is demonstrating at Chelsea all that can be achieved in a short period. But Mourinho doesn’t need Conte to remind him of what can be done quickly. He was a specialist in that kind of success once. Now he is just another manager hoping to be given time.
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