IS JOSE THE RIGHT MAN FOR UNITED?
After his side betrayed their glorious attacking traditions and crashed out of Europe with a whimper, it’s time to ask...
MARTIN KEOWN He’s arrogant, why can’t his team match it?
AFTER every big win, Jose Mourinho seems to become too clever for his own good.
Why change the team that beat Liverpool on Saturday? Scott McTominay must have been wondering what on earth he had done wrong and Marcus Rashford was pushed to the right having been brilliant on the left.
After important results Mourinho can become too arrogant. We saw it before this game when he hit back at comments by Frank de Boer.
United need to play in the bold and bolshy way their manager conducts his press conferences. It is what the fans expect. They want to see their team dictating play and dominating, not reacting to the opposition.
Old Trafford is a strangely intimidating place for the home team when the pressure is on. I played there for England against Greece when David Beckham’s last-minute free-kick sent us to the 2002 World Cup.
As we were chasing a result, the ground was almost like a theatre with people watching anxiously in silence — as a player, that works against you.
Romelu Lukaku has the ability to be a top striker. Rashford can embarrass any full back on the planet. Mourinho has the personnel but does not seem to want to use them in a dominant manner. He is the right man for the job but he needs to let these players play.
It is five years since United last won the Premier League. While the team have been in transition, they have lost their aura.
Playing the way they did against Sevilla is not how to get it back.
JAMIE REDKNAPP Don’t go yet, but DO liven up your play!
DID anyone think that Jose Mourinho was going to go to Old Trafford and play vast, expansive football? With Mourinho you get a proven winner, not pretty football.
The problem this season is that Pep Guardiola has proved you can be utterly dominant while playing great football.
Manchester City are playing almost a different sport to the rest of the Premier League.
Mourinho may not be the only manager under pressure to compete with City but United are the only team in the top four who are not enjoyable to watch.
United can still win the FA Cup this season in what would be a third trophy in two years for Mourinho.
They are nine points clear of Chelsea in a top-four spot and are likely to invest heavily again to try to close the gap on City next season.
Mourinho will point to the fact that United are rebuilding but, in terms of the way they play, you cannot say that any real progress has been made.
While I argued in my Sportsmail column recently that Mourinho had not done enough to earn his new contract, I equally do not think he should leave the club.
After this defeat by Sevilla, it is clear that now is the time for Mourinho to change his approach.
CHRIS SUTTON If you’re going to bore us then win trophies...
WHEN you play this kind of negative football, you have to back it up with trophies. Jose Mourinho will point to his League Cup and Europa League triumphs last season but those are not titles Manchester United should be aiming for.
Mourinho said in 2013: ‘I don’t want to win the Europa League. It would be a big disappointment for me.’
The most staggering thing about his comments after Tuesday’s defeat was his acceptance of the result. It suggested that Mourinho and United are content with their current position. Are they no longer reaching for the stars?
Mourinho has spent close to
£ 300million but has failed to mount a serious challenge for the biggest prizes. It all boils down to their style of play.
Had it been Real Madrid or Barcelona, I could understand that United would want to be cautious. But Sevilla? They are fifth in la liga.
Mourinho is a proven winner. He remains the right man for the job but he faces two choices. Either he gets his team playing on the front foot or proves that his negative brand of football can get results.
IAN LADYMAN He can’t survive if he carries on playing like this
MANCHESTER United are already a better club under Jose Mourinho.
They have better players and a manager who can win things. He may well win the FA Cup this season.
The club failed to nourish and regenerate United’s first team adequately during Sir Alex Ferguson’s final years in charge, and every manager has paid the price for their lack of foresight and poor planning.
That rebuilding process goes on and few managers are better built than Mourinho to handle the inevitable criticism and focus that will come his way during that time.
However, if Mourinho is to continue beyond this summer — an off- season that will witness more heavy spending — he simply cannot continue to encourage the kind of moribund football played by his team recently.
There is a myth about Mourinho that says he has always played this way. That isn’t true. He has always been a pragmatic coach, one who can suffocate a game when necessary. There is a skill in that.
But he has not always been so dreadfully unambitious. His first Chelsea team did not play that way when they won Mourinho five major trophies in three seasons.
So as the 55-year-old looks to the future and plans the ongoing rebuilding of his United squad, he must try to envisage a time when he attempts to play some proper football again.
If Mourinho does not do that then he cannot — and should not — survive.
IAN HERBERT Categorically NOT the right man for job
IT’S what Jose Mourinho says, as much as his team’s pitiful defeat by Sevilla, that tells you he is categorically not the man to restore Manchester United to the high plateau.
His utterances have become a stream of distraction techniques, calculated to deflect from where the team actually stand. Monday’s savage attack on Frank de Boer had those present scrambling to discover what the Dutchman had actually said about the club.
ludicrous, imagined slights have turned him into a dour individual — bereft of that old capacity to light up a room or make good players great. The diminution of Paul Pogba and Alexis Sanchez is on him. The advance of Kevin De Bruyne and Mohamed Salah — both Mourinho rejects — mocks him weekly.
Sir Alex Ferguson also laid false trails after defeat. His ‘typical Germans’ barb deflected from 2010 Champions league elimination by Bayern Munich. But there was usually a sunny demeanour when he arrived to talk the following Friday.
Mourinho is the caretaker: the man who has restored credibility to a great club. Others must now locate the heights.
CHRIS WHEELER They have no choice but to make it work
FOR those fans who believe that Jose Mourinho was never the right choice for Manchester United, the Champions league debacle against Sevilla provided plenty of justification.
They were raised on the exhilarating football of Sir Alex Ferguson, and what they are seeing right now is the polar opposite of that.
It’s even more painful because Manchester City are sauntering towards the title under Pep Guardiola playing a brand of football they want to see at Old Trafford.
Will Mourinho’s teams ever play in the best traditions of United? No. Does that make him the wrong fit? In the long- term, yes, it probably does.
Mourinho’s joyless demeanour — sniping at rival managers and pundits — is mirrored by his team’s performances.
But after three years of drifting in the wrong direction under David Moyes and louis van Gaal, United needed stability.
They went for a headline act to rival Guardiola and have backed him to the tune of £295million. They knew what they were getting.
Changing any time soon would represent another backward step in the difficult post-Ferguson era.
For now, United and Mourinho have no choice but to try to make this work.