OLIVER HOLT: THE SPECIAL ONE HAS BECOME THE BITTER ONE
Grieving for his lost powers, the Special One has become the Bitter One
SOME people let sores heal. Jose Mourinho is not one of t hose people. When Mourinho sees a sore, he picks at it and picks at it and picks at it. Then it turns septic. Then it starts to ooze.
It was like that when he humiliated Eva Carneiro at Chelsea. It’s like that with Paul Pogba now. It’s like that with pretty much everything he touches at Manchester United now. He picks a fight and then he lets it fester. And gradually, it infects everything.
It’s one episode of gesture politics after another with Mourinho. One cry of infallibility after another. One attempt to deflect blame after another. One silly little melodrama after another. One sullen look after another. One barbed comment after another.
It erodes confidence and respect between him and his players. And it leads, with great inevitability and crushing predictability, to the kind of crisis United face now.
The loss to West Ham provided more evidence that United’s troubles run far, far deeper than Mourinho’s increasingly petty and self-defeating spat with Pogba. It is difficult to know where to start with that list but the impression that some club executives care less about trophies than tractor partners in Thailand would be as good a place as any.
In that context, Pogba has become a convenient scapegoat for those still unwilling to accept that Mourinho is the wrong man for the job at Old Trafford and always has been. The France World Cup-winner was booed off by United’s travelling fans when Mourinho substituted him at the London Stadium yesterday and formally anointed the villain of the piece.
The truth, of course, is that the row disfiguring United’s wretched early season is not Pogba’s fault. It really doesn’t take an awful lot of thinking time to figure that out.
Ask yourself instead who the common denominator is in the bouts of internecine warfare that have broken out at the club in the last couple of years and it isn’t Pogba.
Who obliterated Luke Shaw for two years? Not Paul Pogba. Who has marginalised one of the other great talents at the club, Anthony Martial? Not Paul Pogba. Who aimed a sly dig at Marcus Rashford after the defeat by Brighton t his season? Not Paul Pogba.
And who, in the aftermath of United’s Carabao Cup humbling at the hands of Derby last week, dismayed even his own supporters when he said his heart sank when he realised Phil Jones and Eric Bailly were next up in the list of penalty takers in the shoot-out? That’s right: not Paul Pogba.
In the last few years, several significant changes have come over Mourinho. One of the most striking is an apparent predilection for civil war. When he was a great manager, he used to direct all his simmering aggression outwards, at rivals and referees and UEFA. Now he seems to direct the majority of it inwards, at his own players and the hierarchy of the club.
He was at it again on Friday, saying that no one was bigger than the club, a statement that was interpreted as yet another dig at Pogba. Once, Mourinho was the Special One. Now he is the Bitter One. It’s as if he is grieving for the powers he has lost and the way he has been overtaken by more vital, positive, energetic managers such as Pep Guardiola and Jurgen Klopp.
Sometimes, it even feels as if he is taking revenge on players who have tired of his towering selfregard. Mourinho, like many great managers, i s an actor but his audience has stopped suspending its disbelief. He is drowning in his own bile and United are suffering because of it. In his bitterness, Mourinho is dragging a great club down with him.
The United boss got away with it when he was aiming his digs at Shaw, Martial, Jones and Bailly. They didn’t have the power or the profile to fight back. But Pogba is a confident man with a huge social media presence who is not afraid to stand up for himself. And he has the kind of personality that draws others with him. Yet again, it looks as if Mourinho has picked one fight too far.
Whatever the issues are with Pogba, it’s Mourinho’s job to fix them, not aggravate them. The Frenchman is United’s star asset, their most expensive signing and potentially their greatest talent. It’s Mourinho’s job to get the best out of him. It’s never the kid’s fault, psychologists say. It’s never the player’s fault, either. It’s how he’s managed.
Maybe Pogba does want to go to Barcelona. So? Ever thought it might be Mourinho’s job to persuade him to stay? A lot of people believe Eden Hazard wants to go to Real Madrid. He even hinted at it after the World Cup third-place play-off between Belgium and England. But Chelsea manager Maurizio Sarri has not declared war on him. He has nurtured him. And how has Hazard reacted? Well, his two goals against Liverpool in the past four days might give you some idea.
Mourinho can’t seem to grasp that. Either that, or he doesn’t want to because his narcissism won’t let him. This is a players’ game now. They hold all the power and the smart managers find a way of working within t hat dynamic. Mourinho just seems to want to pick a fight all the time. That might have worked 20 years ago but it won’t work now.
Work with Pogba and you get a talent who will help to win you the World Cup and might help you win the Premier League. Try and cut him down to size, try to belittle him in public and you will get a conflict that can only damage the club.
None of this means Pogba is bigger than United. But one of the worries for executive vicechairman Ed Woodward now is that other elite players will look at the way Pogba is being treated and think they want no part of a set-up led by Mourinho.
There are already rumours the schism between Mourinho and Pogba has led to splits within the United dressing room, with a disaffected rump of players gravitating towards the player. That might help to explain why United’s body language was so awful during their loss to Derby.
After that Carabao Cup tie, one of Sky Sports’ pundits, Darren Bent, pointed out that the Derby players looked as if they desperately wanted to win for Frank Lampard. He didn’t see the same desire in the United team to please their boss.
It’s hardly a surprise, is it? That snapshot of United training, with Mourinho and Pogba glaring at each other and everyone else trying to look the other way, was a picture of dysfunctionality. Roundheads meet Cavaliers. At the centre of that dark tableau was Mourinho, picking at that sore as it weeps.