da poker： When Jose Mourinho is accused of being a defensive coach, he usually retorts with quite a good answer. See, you can prove anything with facts.
da dobrowin： In the 2011/12 season, the Portuguese coach was the manager of Real Madrid, and had been tasked with one job and one job alone – stop Pep Guardiola’s Barcelona from winning everything. And finally, in the Catalan’s final season at the Camp Nou, Mourinho was successful.
In fact, he wasn’t just successful, his team were arguably the best of all-time – record-breakers. Or so say the stats. They ended the season with the most wins a team has ever managed in La Liga. They had the most away wins in a season, the most goals in a season (121 – averaging over three goals per game) and the most points in a season (100 – though that was matched by Tito Vilanova’s Barcelona the following season.)
But like the hotel porter who, upon delivering a bottle of champagne ordered for room service, stumbled across George Best sharing a bed with Miss World and £5,000 in cash winnings from a local casino, the only logical question to ask is, ‘Mr Mourinho, where did it all go wrong?’
Because looking at Manchester United’s most recent performances, it surely has all gone wrong.
From the sort of football that leads to 121 goals in one 38-game season to the sort which sees a turgid team go on a 25-match unbeaten run in the league that was so unproductive they climbed only a solitary place from sixth to fifth is surely symptomatic of a wrong turn somewhere along the line. Granted it was Mourinho’s first season at Old Trafford, and he inherited a team which was already notoriously boring. Maybe, despite a big-spending transfer window, the Louis van Gaal residue was just that little bit more difficult to get rid of that was previously thought.
But that means, after pretty much overhauling the team since his arrival just over a year ago, there are surely no excuses this time around. United must challenge for the league title and, probably, put in a good showing in the Champions League in order to prove that Mourinho is the right man for the job. Last season was a successful one, though ‘success’ did rest on the final game of the entire campaign against Ajax in very trying emotional circumstances just days after a terror attack in their home city. That allowed United to win their second trophy of the season – no matter if Mourinho wanted to count three – and enter the Champions League. But you get the feeling that the bar is set significantly higher this time around.
But perhaps success of the trophy-lifting kind isn’t the only type of success that Mourinho should be tasked with.
For the second time in his career, Mourinho has been called upon by a giant of a football club as a reaction against one of their biggest rivals employing Pep Guardiola. Ironically, when Pep was knocked off his perch by the current Manchester United boss in 2012, it was the same year as Ferguson was knocked off his by the noisy neighbours across the city. Both United and Barcelona regained their crowns the very next season.
You get the feeling, though, that United’s current problem shouldn’t really be the trophies that could be won by City and Guardiola, but the type of stylish, attractive football they’ll end up playing if they get it right. For United, it’s not just their dominance in the city of Manchester that’s under threat, it’s also their crown as the entertainers of English football, and indeed beyond.
And this time it won’t be a sophisticated team from the continent who do entertainment better, but lowly City whom they’ve lorded over for years.
Perhaps last season was the continuation of the blip, the bit where it starts to look desperate before it all gets better again under the stewardship of Mourinho who will, in his second season, turn United from a team resembling van Gaal’s boring lot into a team in the Portuguese coach’s own image. But, given the trend of this summer’s signings at Old Trafford seems to be more about physical might than anything else, not much is likely to change in the entertainment stakes.
And so it’s fitting that United, after taking what looks to be a path away from beautiful football, will play Real Madrid in the Super Cup tonight. They’ll face the team who have won three Champions League titles in the four years since he left the club, and the team where it all seemed to go wrong for the Portuguese coach.
If Jose Mourinho’s answer to the charge of being a ‘defensive’ manager is to point to the 11/12 season where his Real Madrid side broke record after record, then it might also be telling that he doesn’t have a more recent example. Somewhere or other, something went wrong.