CITY Jose is catching ‘The Disease’ in Manchester
IF Pep Guardiola ever gets time to look out of his Salford apartment window, he should not be too surprised if he sees a Jodrell Bank-sized telescope peering at him from the nearby Lowry Hotel.
On the thin end of that telescope would be United manager Jose Mourinho, a man who once mocked Arsene Wenger as a ‘voyeur.’
His snipe at the Arsenal boss, when Mourinho was in charge at Stamford Bridge, was based on the fact that Wenger ‘speaks, speaks, speaks about Chelsea.’
And yet, since the week of the derby, there has been a virtual avalanche of verbals aimed at the Blues, all tumbling from Mourinho’s mouth.
That has sparked the fear – or the joy among the media – that the toxic relationship between Mourinho and Guardiola, which earned it the tag ‘The Disease’ in Spain, is also about to break out into open hostility in Manchester.
But while Guardiola has let his team do the talking, Mourinho has talked incessantly about City and Guardiola for the last month. In the build-up to the derby, the Reds boss’s nervousness manifested itself in a blatant attempt to influence the referee.
He claimed initially that City were divers, and then that they used tactical fouls to inhibit counter-attacks against their high-pressing style.
That ignored the facts of the matter, that United commit more fouls per game – 10.6 to 10.4. If Mourinho has analysed how many of City’s fouls are ‘tactical,’ he is perhaps even more of a voyeur than we were beginning to think.
He also threw in a playground snitchstyle whinge about Guardiola wearing a yellow ribbon as a show of support for Catalan political prisoners.
Then, after City had schooled his team, he tried to enter the celebrating Blues dressing room, shouting about respect, sparking a 15-man tussle between players and staff of both sides.
Not content with having started the rumpus, Mourinho then had the gall to suggest that City’s reaction to their victory was down to poor education or manners.
As City’s serene progress at the top of the league has intensified the pressure on Mourinho, his squeakings have become increasingly desperate.
A man who splashed out £90m for Paul Pogba, and then £75m for Romelu Lukaku – eclipsing City’s transfer record of £54m – then claimed it was all about spending.
He said that City had got rid of two good full-backs in Pablo Zabaleta and Aleks Kolarov and replaced them ‘with three.’
Not only did that skim over the fact that those two City servants were both past their sell-by date, it was blatantly untrue – the Blues actually got rid of FOUR full-backs in the summer, as Gael Clichy and Bacary Sagna also left, and replaced them with three.
The prices paid for Kyle Walker and Benjamin Mendy are irrelevant – as any average student of football can see, full-backs are essential to Guardiola’s expansive style of football.
Given that, for Mourinho to suggest that spending big money on full-backs is any more outrageous than buying a striker who has been out-scored by Raheem Sterling, is disingenuous to say the least.
The beauty of all this for City fans is that the more Mourinho moans, the more it is apparent that he is being beaten down by Guardiola.