NOW GET ME FOUR NEW STARS
But even signing Griezmann won’t make Mourinho’s United cavalier
THE next time Jose Mourinho picks a Manchester United team for a competitive game the opposition will not be the callow youth of Ajax but the real champions of Europe.
Real Madrid or Juventus — who meet in the Champions League final a week tomorrow — will face United in the Super Cup in Macedonia on August 8.
United’s manager will like that. United will be back where they belong and, just as importantly, so will he.
In some ways, the 54-year-old’s reign at Old Trafford starts here. This has been a make-do-andmend season, a year to get United back to where they needed to be by whatever means possible. Now we will see what his vision — his version of Manchester United — actually looks like.
In the wake of Wednesday night’s Europa League triumph in Stockholm, Mourinho departed for holiday with a clear message that it was now the turn of his football club to bring him the new players he wants.
There are likely to be four. Burnley defender Michael Keane will be one, with the Lancashire club wanting £30million for the United old boy, while Mourinho wants the Atletico Madrid forward Antoine Griezmann to be his stellar signing. The France star has a buy-out clause approaching £90m in his contract.
So the numbers this summer will be high. Sources at United boardroom level expect this to be a transfer window of exorbitant spending across Europe, with clubs fuelled by TV revenues and the market driven upwards by the excesses of an elite few.
This will not concern United greatly, given the successful way the club continue to function off the field. What will interest some United supporters more is the type of player Mourinho buys and how he asks them to play.
Mourinho’s achievements this season have been significant. To win two cup competitions was more than probably even he expected when he picked up the pieces of Louis van Gaal’s reign last summer and among it all have been some typical, bespoke Mou-rinho performances.
An early goalless draw at Liverpool at a time when Jurgen Klopp’s team were flying, a 2-0 home defeat of eventual champions Chelsea and a Europa League final victory that came with less than 35 per cent ball possession.
That tells us everything about Mourinho’s ability to organise and motivate, about his cussedness and his pragmatic ability to follow the path most likely to lead to the right result.
When Mourinho aimed sling shots at the ‘poets’ who criticise his style and his methods on Wednesday, it was an assault straight from his heart.
Don’t ever think that his modern reputation as a spoiler of football matches doesn’t bother him. What we do not know is whether he feels inclined or able to change at this club, with this squad and at this stage of his career.
ALOOK at United’s team in Stockholm tells us much. Ander Herrera was voted man of the match but Marouane Fellaini was probably United’s best player. On the left-hand side, meanwhile, United seemed at times to be playing with two full backs — Henrikh Mkhitaryan and Matteo Darmian — as they tried to counter the threat of the dangerous Chelsea loanee Bertrand Traore.
It was a team designed to strangle Ajax and it worked beautifully, just as Mourinho’s plan to stifle Chelsea at Old Trafford worked. That day Herrera — who counts himself as a creative midfield player — was detailed to man-mark Eden Hazard. That, remember, was a home game.
So at this stage it looks as though it would take the recruitment of more than four new players to radically alter the direction of travel under Mourinho.
United will get more out of £89m Paul Pogba after a rare summer of rest and the same can probably be said of Mkhitaryan and maybe Herrera. But United will in all likelihood lose Wayne Rooney and Zlatan Ibrahimovic this summer, Michael Carrick will be a year older while Anthony Martial and Jesse Lingard need to take larger steps forward before next season starts than they have previously.
Do not be surprised if Marcus Rashford ponders a request to go out on loan, meanwhile. The chances are quite slim of the 19-year-old England striker playing in his favoured position once somebody such as Griezmann arrives.
Against the background of all this, the conundrums facing Mou-rinho are clear. United’s transfer policy had been failing even before the retirement of Sir Alex Ferguson and the problems that continued to build under David Moyes and then Van Gaal are Mourinho’s now and for some time yet.
How many of United’s first team would get in the Chelsea team or even the Manchester City team? Not many.
Mourinho’s is a squad still beset by fundamental weakness. That is no platform on which to construct a return to United’s cavalier principles of years gone by so a personal instinct is that Mourinho may stick to what he knows in the short to medium term and one wonders if that is really so bad anyway. The United fans who sang and laughed on the trains from the Friends Arena back into Stockholm Central at midnight on Wednesday were not singing about style. They were singing about winning. Mourinho has proved himself to be the ultimate modern exponent of the art once more this season. Next up will be Real or Juventus in Skopje. Do not be surprised if he has a plan in mind already.