Before Jose Mourinho questioned the mainstream media’s possession statistics at Anfield on Monday night, he explained why he had surrendered the ball in the pursuit of victory during the match against Liverpool.
“That was the game that we planned,” he told Geoff Shreeves. “We don’t want to control the game by having the ball all the time. We know that they want to press our first phase of the building up. We know that all the passes between Bailly and Smalling in the direction of Fellaini and Herrera would be passes that they want to press… we know that their transition is really strong and high so we adapt to the situation.”
Mourinho made a persuasive case, but is there any situation in football where Mourinho’s way of adapting isn’t to give the ball away? He obeys the law of the instrument – if all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. Mourinho considers not having the ball the answer to all of football’s problems.
He has only just arrived at United so, perhaps, as Ryan Giggs put it, in “the current climate”, he is right to begin as all pragmatic managers begin by making United difficult to beat.
United went to Anfield with an approach which would have been familiar to Liverpool fans who watched coaches like Gerard Houllier and Rafa Benitez lay down the foundations for those sides in a similar fashion. There was nothing Mourinho did on Monday night which would have agitated Tony Pulis or, in another era, George Graham.
All this is fine. There is, after all, something refreshing in Mourinho’s approach which puts a premium on victory which, in the final analysis, is supposed to be the point of professional sport. This attitude can sometimes appear to be an antidote to the bullshit which takes up so much of our time these days.
If there is a four-year plan in Mourinho’s world, it involves victories all the time. If there is a philosophy, it is the philosophy advanced by Alex Ferguson over all the years of success – that his side was expected to beat everyone they played. Anything else was a systems failure, a bewildering malfunction which had taken everyone – especially the manager – by surprise.
By that reckoning, however, Mourinho’s Manchester United are at the beginning of yet another long process. Mourinho may have insisted before and after the game that he had been planning for victory, but it appeared to be an after-thought, a bunch of flowers picked up in a petrol station on the way home, rather than the centrepiece of his strategy.
United’s strategy was to avoid defeat, a strange approach if Liverpool were not the side people said they were. United are used to winning at Anfield as is Mourinho, and it may be that the approach again signalled that Mourinho in 2016 is a manager of reduced ambition on the football field, a manager who always finds a way to give the ball away.
If there was any sting in Manchester United, it came in Mourinho’s post-match interview when he said Liverpool weren’t the “last wonder of the world”, as the MSM had been making out.
United supporters will have enjoyed that putdown, but it was the only moment of arrogance on the evening from their side. It was not just the media who had viewed Liverpool with awe. Mourinho approached the game as if he was facing one of the greatest sides on earth with a plan which centred on containment, on restricting Liverpool’s play as if they were the last wonder of the world, not a side who had made a reasonable start to the season.
United denied Liverpool as Burnley had denied them, although they didn’t have the satisfaction of victory.
Mourinho will be pleased at how his side obeyed his instructions, something which also represents progress this season.
At the interval in the Manchester derby, Mourinho had a different reaction. “I told them at half-time – some of you are trying to do what I told you not to do,” he said after the defeat to Pep Guardiola’s side. On that day, United had played the passes Mourinho didn’t want them to play. He had identified the nail, but United’s players refused to believe they only had a hammer.
Afterwards, Mourinho said if football allowed unlimited substitutions, he would have made three changes after 20 minutes, but he didn’t want to “destroy the players”.
Henrikh Mkhitaryan hasn’t played since that defeat when he failed to close down Aleksandar Kolarov in the build-up to City’s opening goal.
Mkhitaryan has been bothered by a groin injury since then, but he was declared fit for Monday’s game even if it always seemed unlikely that he would play.
Maybe he is absorbing Mourinho’s ideas in training, methodically making shuttle runs to demonstrate he has learned when to close players down, something which he should be used to as a former Jurgen Klopp player.
He is a player who could alter the pedestrian attacking patterns United employed on Monday night.
In Mourinho’s defence, United are a work in progress, even if they have spent another £140 million in the summer making slow progress as they try to recover from Alex Ferguson’s retirement.
In time, perhaps, Mourinho will have the attacking players who will allow United to play like Chelsea did at their peak. For a couple of seasons, Chelsea had a team which managed to provide the security in defence Mourinho demands, combined with devastating attacking options.
In 2005, they went to Anfield and won 4-1 to move nine points clear at the top of the table. Chelsea would fight in attack as well as defence and while Joe Cole and Damien Duff were central that afternoon, Didier Drogba provided the platform for their performances as he so often did.
Zlatan Ibrahimovic is not Didier Drogba which is one of United’s problems and maybe some others would be solved if Mkhitaryan could get back into the side.
He could come back having absorbed the lessons, primarily the lesson that there is little to be gained and much to be lost by doing what Mourinho has told you not to do.
Or Mkhitaryan may be the latest casualty in the long war Mourinho has been waging against a certain type of attacking player. At Chelsea in his second spell he saw little merit in a number of them, including Andre Schurrle, Juan Cuadrado, Mohamed Salah, Juan Mata and Kevin De Bruyne.
Eden Hazard was, according to Schurrle, granted more freedom but even that relationship soured in Mourinho’s final months.
When Hazard praised Antonio Conte earlier this season, he appeared to allude to the restrictive approach of Mourinho. ”He’s tried to give us confidence. He knows players because he used to be one.”
Conte’s Chelsea are Mourinho’s next opponents in the league and Mourinho may yet decide to take a similar approach, although nobody is talking about Chelsea as the last wonder of the world.
Who knows how Mourinho sees them, but this is the way he works, even at Manchester United.
On the basis of his record, can expect to be granted a little bit more time than David Moyes, although maybe if Mourinho’s United had delivered as many crosses as Moyes’s used to do, United would have won at Anfield on Monday.
When Louis Van Gaal was dismissed in the summer, his style of football was cited as one of the reasons for his dismissal. United had scored 49 goals in the league and there was an expectation that United had a certain style. There was, it was said, the Manchester United way.
When Mourinho was appointed, there were those who expressed concerns that he would not follow the great attacking traditions of United. Perhaps they had previously expressed some concerns that United were in danger of turning into a sacking club.
Before and after Ferguson, United were a sacking club, while they sacrificed all traditions at times under Ferguson in pursuit of the thing that mattered more than anything: victory.
If there was a Manchester United way, it was often driven by that need. United were compelling and attacked because it was the most effective way of winning. Their supporters could point out that played in a certain style rarely made United loved by anyone except their own supporters in the modern era.
Mourinho will need victories – maybe starting on Sunday – if his methods are to have any long-term appeal. Perhaps his insistence that United had 42% possession, not 35% in the press conference on Monday night was a recognition that there is a p.r. battle going on.
But that is a battle he can’t win, because ultimately he doesn’t have the appetite for that fight. Mourinho campaigns on other fronts, always with the promise of success, always vigilant for a betrayal of his work.
And he only knows one way of achieving success. There may well be a Manchester United way, a style of football which observes the greatest traditions of the club, but when Mourinho was appointed it became an abstraction. There is only one tradition being followed at Manchester United at the moment. At Old Trafford now, there is only the Jose Mourinho way.
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