Mourinho has the hardest problem
The Portuguese is concerned about the massive strides Manchester City has made under Pep Guardiola.
As much of football’s aristocracy gathered in Moscow last week for the World Cup draw, the conversation in one corner turned to the club game, and who was especially impressing. Pep Guardiola’s Manchester City were naturally discussed at length, but one high-profile coach had particularly high praise for the Catalan.
“He looks at football in a way like no-one else I’ve ever known,” the manager told The Independent. “It’s virtually unique.”
It’s also now possible that has led to Guardiola creating a truly original and unique way of playing, something genuinely unprecedented, and one that appropriately has City on the brink of a unique and unprecedented achievement: 14 successive wins in a single Premier League season. To manage it at Manchester United on Sunday and away to their biggest rivals and closest challengers would only emphasise the completeness of what they’re doing, and further reflect the extent of this evolution.
It is also the puzzle Jose Mourinho must figure out, but the real challenge is that it is not actually any one problem but several all together.
As one figure who works with City confided to The Independent, the real key with this side is that they have so many points of attack, but those points are always moving, always rotating, always revolving. That in itself creates an almost infinite number of possible moves and combinations, that really cannot come without a very sophisticated level of co-ordination, and a lot of work and deep comprehension.
It is why they are currently on course to smash goal records this season, and one reason why they have hit so many late strikes, with no one yet able to completely shut their fully-motivated first team out. The 0-0 in the League Cup against Wolves came in a competition that Guardiola has made his disregard for well known, meaning it is still unknown how to truly stop them.
This is not to say they are the best attacking team ever or anything of the sort, since that is a totally different argument with naturally different parameters, but this does mark a difference - or, at least from his broadly similar Bayern Munich, an evolution - in how attacking has been executed.
With pretty much any of the great sides you can think of - particularly in the Premier League - their forward play has generally been based on a core of four to five brilliant players who had obvious strengths and relatively fixed roles.
The best XI of Manchester United 1998-2001 for example had the interchanging of Dwight Yorke and Andy Cole, bolstered by the ingenuity of Paul Scholes, and served by the alternating wing-play of David Beckham’s crossing and Ryan Giggs’s dribbling. It was of course brilliant wing-play, but relatively conventional, just perfectly executed.
Subsequent supreme sides have gradually multiplied this level of interchanging and inherent mobility, from Arsenal’s “Invincibles” and United’s Cristiano Ronaldo-fired 2008 Champions League winners through to Carlo Ancelotti’s Chelsea and the two Manchester City champions.
All have of course had real unpredictability, like what Eden Hazard offers with Chelsea, but what Guardiola has tried to do with City is multiply this to the Nth degree and set up a system whereby there are effectively “five Eden Hazards” or “five Alexis Sanchezs” - someone he ominously wants to add in January, because the Catalan is sensing that winning all the major trophies is suddenly possible. THE INDEPENDENT