Lose to Ajax and YOU will be a specialist in failure, Jose...
IT IS easy to be curmudgeonly about what Jose Mourinho has achieved at Manchester United this season. With his constant whining, his relentless narcissism, his stream of excuses, his attacks on Luke Shaw — a player who nearly lost his career playing in United’s colours — and his general lack of grace, he is not an easy manager to love.
Compare him with Antonio Conte, who has taken English football by storm this season, and he looks sour and stale. The same if you put him next to Liverpool’s Jurgen Klopp. His United team have lacked the energy and dynamism of the best teams. For a manager who has achieved so much, he once again has much to prove.
In many ways, United have stood still this season. Some might even say they have gone backwards. They are unlikely now to match the fourth place in the Premier League that Louis van Gaal led them to in his first season at Old Trafford. As things stand, they are struggling to equal the fifth place the doomed Dutchman achieved last season.
United’s former captain, Roy Keane, said last week that United’s position in the league, now 22 points behind leaders Chelsea, is ‘embarrassing’. Mourinho’s emphasis on defence made them difficult to beat, as a 25- game run without defeat attests, but it made them look ponderous and dull beside Chelsea and Spurs.
It is surprising that a manager of Mourinho’s pedigree has not done better. It is not as if he has been short of cash. The Glazer family has already backed him generously. United’s executive vice-chairman, Ed Woodward, has taken over from Peter Ridsdale as English football’s undisputed Father Christmas. For references, ask agent Mino Raiola.
Mourinho spent £145 million on Eric Bailly, Henrikh Mkhitaryan and Paul Pogba last summer to bolster United’s squad. The least that most United fans expected was a top-four finish. That Mourinho is struggling to deliver that has been a grave disappointment.
It was in that context that Mourinho was asked on Friday whether this season would count as a failure if United did not win the Europa League against Ajax in Stockholm a week on Wednesday. Well, of course it would.
Even Mourinho acknowledged ‘the media have a right to say it and it makes sense to say it’. A more interesting question might have been whether United’s season would count as a failure even if they do win it.
The Europa League is an unlikely source of salvation for the United boss. It is, after all, a competition he has poured scorn on in the past, particularly when his bitter rival, Rafa Benitez, won it for Chelsea in Amsterdam in 2013.
English football regards t he Europa League with a strange snobbery and Chelsea were derided, as much as praised, when they won it. It was almost as if they should have been embarrassed about it. Mourinho suggested the competition was very much below him then. He was a Champions League kind of guy. But the Europa League is not a dud competition, whatever Mourinho once said.
The last four winners have been Sevilla, Chelsea, Atletico Madrid and Porto. Bad teams don’t win it and apart from their scare against Celta Vigo on Thursday night, United’s progress to the final in Stockholm 10 days from now has been relatively serene.
So winning the competition would soothe away the shortcomings of this troubled first season. Beat Ajax, and the dismay about United spending most of this campaign languishing in the table as the sixth of the Big Six will be forgotten. Rightly so. Winning the Europa League will obscure United’s season- long battle to rise above mediocrity.
United are a club built on their great European legends, on their pioneering adventures in the European Cup when the FA were discouraging participation, on the great tragedy of the Munich air disaster and the emotional triumph against Benfica at Wembley in 1968, which remains English club football’s most moving and dramatic narrative.
European triumph is woven into the club’s fabric and the Europa League, once the UEFA Cup, is the only major trophy they have not won. To close the circle would be another symbol of the club’s standing in the world game.
That was why the United Review for the Vigo game featured a front cover with pictures of all the trophies United have won arranged as a jigsaw, with the Europa League ready to slide into place. ‘The Final Piece’, the headline said.
Beat Ajax and Mourinho will be able to ride the wave all the way through to the start of next season and beyond. Beat Ajax and United will be in the Champions League again, making it easier to sign football’s elite without paying a grotesque premium to an agent.
Beat Ajax, and this season that is about to close will be lent a happy sheen. It will feel like a building block to restoring United to their place challenging for the very top honours in the club game.
It is a fine achievement to have reached the final but everybody in football knows how quickly the excitement of that achievement turns in on itself if the team don’t win. Excitement turns quickly to disillusion. Suddenly, getting to the final is forgotten and second is nothing. And then the recriminations begin.
Lose to Ajax and Mourinho will face a lot of awkward questions. Lose to Ajax and the succour of a place in the Champions League will probably be lost. Lose to Ajax and Mourinho will be under pressure from the start of next season. And history tells us he does not react well to that kind of pressure.
It would be interesting to know whether Mourinho appreciates the irony of the situation. So much rests on whether he wins a competition he once scorned. If United come up short then on the basis of this season, he will find it hard to complain if someone calls him a specialist in failure.