Mour, Mour, Mour!

> There’s more to Jose’s precarious situation than the third-season syndrome

WITH all of the renewed debate about Jose Mourinho’s third seasons, and particularly that fateful final year at Chelsea that has drawn so many parallels with Manchester United now, there is genuinely one big myth.

It is not, however, what many might think. The myth is that Mourinho’s problems started with that third season, and the notorious controversy with Eva Carneiro during the opening 2-2 draw with Swansea City. That incident really just brought things to a head, because the problems had actually started halfway through his second season – the title win.

That was when Mourinho began to complain about referees and scheduling way beyond the mention of anything else that the Chelsea squad thought it was has a very fair point about United’s recruitment and the need to at the very least improve the defence and wide players, the manner he does so takes it to extremes that just cause more problems. Those in power get irritated. That was precisely what happened with Roman Abramovich in 2006/07 and the summer of 2015, and that is what is starting to happen now with United.

Sources say it is getting “testy”. It sometimes feels as if Mourinho makes such a point of this to make it known that he should not be blamed for any poor results that come, but some of his comments then just make those poor results self-fulfilling, a classic case of talking yourself into trouble.

They set the wrong tone for the season, creating excuses and instantly removing a never quite a party in the first place. The mood was edgy from the beginning, a series of winners just weren’t as open to Mourinho’s style for what was really the first time in his career, and one feeling was his response to that was too suffocating.

This was also when Pep Guardiola started to influence real change in the game, and many began to detect a change in Mourinho. His authority over players wasn’t as natural as it used to be, and he reacted in increasingly draconian ways.

This has become a more pronounced problem since Madrid. The emotional intensity of his teams has just given way to more intense emotion from the manager, where his response to almost every problem is hardline and hard criticism.

That is even harder to sustain, and has given rise at United to something