Mourinho gives United injection of self-belief
Old Trafford is pumping again after the tortured regimes of Moyes and van Gaal, reports Rory Smith.
The banner was there, as it always is, draped from the balustrade that separates the tiers of the Stretford End. It sits sandwiched between the scoreboard and a flag commemorating the date of the Munich air disaster. ‘‘MUFC: the religion,’’ it reads. A little further along is another, on a similar theme: ‘‘MUFC: For Every Manc A Religion.’’
Yesterday, the fans beneath unfurled a new number, especially designed for Jose Mourinho’s home debut, a 2-0 win against Southampton. On one side, the Portuguese’s face was picked out in white on a red background. On the other, a slogan, a creed. ‘‘This is the one,’’ it read.
Just in case anyone missed the sledgehammer subtlety of the message, the Stone Roses song of the same name was blaring out from Old Trafford’s speakers at the same time. The past three years might have brought nothing but false idols - David Moyes, the chosen one, the wrong one; Louis van Gaal, the Iron Tulip, wilting and rusted – but they have not lost faith. If anything, their desire to believe is stronger than ever.
To some extent, of course, that is the power of Mourinho. His selfbelief is so great, so impervious to any setback, that it is contagious. He has no time for hubris; he never succumbs to anything approaching self-doubt. He has made plain that United are a ‘‘giant’’ club, but that he is ‘‘ready’’ to manage them, and he has done so with such certainty that you might feel it would be ridiculous to entrust it to anybody else.
His first words in the programme, too, spoke volumes. This place has been a graveyard for ambition ever since Sir Alex Ferguson retired. Moyes was intimidated by it; Van Gaal tried to change it and failed. Mourinho is not fazed. ‘‘It is good to be home,’’ he wrote. For all his affection for Chelsea, it is here, on this sort of stage, that he feels he belongs.
His actions bear out his belief. He wasted no time in informing Ed Woodward precisely which players he required to balance out his squad; Woodward, his previous experiences in the murky waters of the transfer market strewn with mistakes and regrets, immediately transformed himself into a deadeyed, hard-bargaining negotiator, or at least as much as anyone backed with an apparently bottomless pit of money can.
Mourinho has set about changing the culture of the training ground – removing the cameras installed by Van Gaal, getting rid of the stifling Big Brother approach – and cutting the dead wood from his team, gently letting a number of youth team players leave on loan and rather more brusquely drawing the curtain on Bastian Schweinsteiger’s time here.
That, though, was child’s play compared with his next task. Most managers are wary of appearing to criticise their own supporters; the faint rumbling of rebellion towards Jurgen Klopp among certain sections of Liverpool’s fanbase last season, when the German seemed to spend a little too much time telling them how to behave, a powerful example as to why. Even the most popular managers regard that as a battle they generally cannot win.
Mourinho knows that only too well from his time at Chelsea, when his chiding over the lack of atmosphere at Stamford Bridge – at the start of the second season of his second spell there – threatened to sour his relationship with supporters who had, until that point, adored him almost unquestioningly. After a while, even he recognised the need to back down.
It is a measure of how comfortable he feels in his new role, then, that before he had so much as managed a competitive game at Old Trafford, he was trying to conduct the orchestra. United’s fans, he said both in his pre-match press conference and again in his programme notes, needed to find their voice once more; they could no longer place the emphasis so squarely on the theatre part of Theatre of Dreams.
Some supporters might, perhaps, have found that a little presumptuous; though this can be a surprisingly quiet stadium, it is far from the only ground that has seen its atmosphere dwindle in recent years. More than that, Old Trafford has always been capable of producing fearsome, spinetingling, crackling noise; it just requires a little more stimulation than other arenas.
Mourinho, though, had no need to worry. His fans seemed to take the message on board. True, they were helped by a convincing performance, an easy victory, and by the dart of excitement that comes from new signings. Paul Pogba’s name received a deafening cheer; every one of the flashes of his prodigious ability, too.
Beyond all of that, though, was something else. Old Trafford has lost its voice in recent years, during the tortured tenures of Moyes and Van Gaal, because it has been rife with doubt. Supporters have come here fearing what they are about to see. The church of Mourinho does not allow for such uncertainty; its high priest asks for absolute faith. He knows he is the one; the fervour and the frenzy of his supporters, his followers, suggests that, once again, they believe.