Mourinho hasn’t lost fire but he will have to change ways like Fergie did to win war with Guardiola

EARLIER on this season, Jose Mourinho wanted to call a Manchester United player up on a transgression, so he hauled the squad member and his representative into his office. It wasn’t exactly a major issue, but it was an irritant, and brought quite the blast from the Portuguese.

“With Jose, you know what you’re going to get,” one figure who has been in similar situations says. “But then when you get it, f**king hell.”

So much has been made of Mourinho’s public mood, and even his very interest in the job, but such accounts illustrate that the fire is very much still there.

It is a fire that is greatly needed, maybe now more than ever, because he is probably facing the greatest challenge of his career: to properly re-establish himself and his club at the pinnacle of the game. To be the winner again, rather than just a competitor.

Sure, it is nowhere near as drastic or as dramatic a situation as what happened at Chelsea in 2015-’16, but this challenge is all the greater because it immediately follows that.

It is about the long-term, rather than such a pronounced perfect storm that had such specific problems as at Stamford Bridge.

And sure, it doesn’t have the scale and fundamental difficulty of taking a club like Porto to a Champions League win, but then that was at a point of ascendancy in Mourinho’s career when his decision-making was so good and his thinking so far ahead that everything seemed to come so naturally.

That is not happening now. It is as if everything is a grind.

It is one of the game’s great charms that so many historic storylines play out again in different eras, and with ironic twists, because Mourinho now finds himself facing a very similar challenge that he set for Alex Ferguson back when the Portuguese left Porto for Chelsea in 2004.

Then, the illustriously successful Manchester United boss came up against the most exciting coach in the game, who – because of his own brilliance – walked into a situation that was as close to perfect in football as you could imagine, with so many burgeoning stars and a club of almost unprecedented sources willing to back. It led to a lot of talk that Ferguson was done, finished as a force.

Now, the illustriously successful Manchester United boss is up against… well, you get the idea.

Pep Guardiola’s Manchester City have the potential – to paraphrase Ferguson himself when talking about Liverpool at the end of the 1980s – to make life change for United and everyone else, “dramatically”.

This isn’t just an easy parallel because they are both United managers. It is something that cuts to the core of management, of great careers, and how they react and keep them great.

It doesn’t mean there is an easy next step, either, that Mourinho will get it right just because Ferguson did. History getting replayed is very rarely that clean.

Ferguson met and ultimately demolished the challenge of Mourinho’s 2004-’06 Chelsea by – ironically, given the context – doubling down on one of his driving qualities: the ability to adapt. He also showed a lot of patience, but equally a judicious mind for iron-strong decisions at key moments.

The Scot gradually built a new team around the talent of young players like Wayne Rooney and Cristiano Ronaldo, ignoring impatience and inevitable criticism of shaky results from outside the club and even within,

leading to a genuine landmark moment in United’s history: the dismissal of Roy Keane after a controversial – and non-broadcast – appearance on the club’s own TV station.

Ferguson never publicly threw his players under a bus and wasn’t going to tolerate it from one of his biggest, but the real reason was much colder and decisive.

Keane just wasn’t performing to the same level. He required too much accommodation. Ferguson was too forward-thinking.

With a few other key pieces added to the side, he also adapted how they approached both games and seasons.

Ferguson had noted how crucial Mourinho’s brilliant backline had been one, and finally restored one to United, but also noted an evolution in attacking play and how the most promising were prioritising interchanging f luidity rather than fixed focal points.

It meant that he began to put out a rock-solid and pragmatic side, but one that could effortlessly change to proactive and blindingly unpredictable assertiveness.

They were also primed to start the season on the front foot, directly responding to Mourinho’s record points hauls, and a marked change from Ferguson letting his side settle into a season for late surges.

The result was probably his greatest team.

Given what is happening at City, and even allowing for an element of hyperbole about what they’re doing, Mourinho really requires a similar response.

He probably does need to change something, too.

While one of Ferguson’s finest qualities was that constant willingness and ability to adapt and evolve, one of the main criticisms of Mourinho has been a refusal to do that.

It sometimes feels – at least on the outside – that he is instead belligerently intent on proving that his way remains the best.

It’s possible he could pull it off, of course, but very few managers in football history have stayed at the top for more than 10 years – let alone 15 – without some significant shift in their methods.

Mourinho is broadly playing the same pragmatic reactive style as he did back in 2004, with so much of the attack focused on a physical centre-forward, and that despite the game seeing at least two major tactical evolutions since then.

The fire is there. The wonder is whether it can bring blazing success again. (© Independent News Service)