Football’s back Mourinho takes aim at Van Gaal as United take on Leicester in the Community Shield
New manager reveals his concern at the size of the task of unravelling the style of Dutch predecessor
There was a fanaticism in the way Louis van Gaal talked frequently about the need to “retrain the brains” of his Manchester United players but, to most observers, that rewiring did little more than breed a series of robots adept at passing the ball backwards and sideways and not much else.
Well, after the brainwashing, prepare for the cleansing, as Jose Mourinho attempts to unravel the muddle left by Van Gaal. United’s new manager may have tried to give the impression of a man reluctant to stick the boot into his predecessor, but it did not require much reading between the lines to spot the knife being inserted and slowly twisted.
For a manager about to obliterate the world transfer record by signing France midfielder Paul Pogba from Juventus for £100 million, sympathy for the hand Mourinho was dealt by Van Gaal will certainly be in short supply. But the Portuguese clearly fears that the time it will take to reprogram minds could compromise the way his team begin the season, starting against champions Leicester City in the Community Shield at Wembley this afternoon.
“We try to improve everything, we use every minute we have to improve the players and especially to improve the principles of how we play as a team, but it is very difficult,” Mourinho said. “It would be easier to get 20 new players and start with them from zero than to get a squad that was previously with a top manager but with different ideas than mine. It’s difficult to change the way we analyse the defensive organisation, it’s difficult to organise a team in the first phases of the build-up that plays so differently.
“Sometimes we all feel that contradiction between what they are used to doing and what they want to do, and that, from the mental point of view, is not easy to adapt to. So we need time. I cannot tell you that we are going to start the season at 100 miles per hour.
“If you are a right-back or a left-back and every time you have the ball you pass to a central defender and you repeat that for two years …” Mourinho did not need to finish the sentence. Any United supporter who was numbed watching the endless cycle of sideways and backwards passes last season – and the inevitable dearth of shots – will appreciate the scale of Van Gaal’s indoctrination.
“It is not because I tell the players, ‘Get the ball and look for solutions in between the lines and look for solutions in the space behind’ that they are going to do that [straight away],” he said. “In training, yes, you stop, you speak, you repeat. In competition, no, the ball arrives to you and you have no time for that. You go for automatic, the instinct, so the dynamic is very difficult.”
Mourinho said the easy option would have been to change little, but clearly he does not like some of what he has inherited. “For a central defender to mark man-to-man and to chase his opponent even if the opponent goes 15 to 20 metres away from him, I am not saying that is wrong. I am saying it is not my way to do it and so say now that we play zonal, we don’t follow the man, we make the team compact and, in between our positions, we mark the movement of the opponent. It is a completely different profile, it takes time. But I have to change this. One position is, ‘OK, let’s go the same way because I am afraid to change’ or [the other is], ‘I want to change, but that can take some time’. I’ve made that decision and the players are working really hard to go in my direction and I am sure they will.”
There was insight, too, into how United are likely to play under him, with Mourinho of the view that neither Wayne Rooney nor Zlatan Ibrahimovic, his first-choice strike force, is suited to playing on the counter-attack.
“When I have in my [Chelsea] team Damien Duff and Arjen Robben, or when I have in my [Real Madrid] team Ángel di María and Cristiano Ronaldo, how do you want me to play?” Mourinho said. “If I don’t play a certain way, it is because I don’t want to win. When I have Ibrahimovic and Adriano at Inter and the next season [Goran] Pandev and [Diego] Milito, you have to play a completely different way. I don’t think Rooney and Ibrahimovic are players to play in the counter-attack. We have to be dominant in our game but, again, one thing is to be dominant by trying to have a huge percentage of ball possession. Another way to be dominant is to play in the last third and to use the best quality of two strikers like Rooney and Ibrahimovic, so I have to read the situation and adapt to the quality of the players.”
Not that Mourinho, a title winner in his first seasons at Porto, Chelsea and Inter, wants to try to quell expectations. If anything, he intends to raise them. “It is not new in my career, everywhere I’ve had to cope with that situation,” Mourinho said of the immediate pressure to win. “It doesn’t matter where I am, everyone expects big things. I like to create that expectation. I like the players to feel it.
“Sometimes during my career I’ve created some unrealistic targets and by creating these you push the team to unexpected levels. To win the Champions League with Porto or Inter is unexpected and a very risky objective. To win championships in the first season is a little bit of the same, but I like that. People analyse it as arrogant, that’s not a problem for me. The reality is I always feel this kind of establishment of very difficult targets can only help us.” So, too, the odd verbal hand grenade. Having hit back at Liverpool manager Jürgen Klopp and his Arsenal counterpart, Arsène Wenger, over their “unethical” criticism of United’s pursuit of Pogba, Mourinho also scoffed when asked how Claudio Ranieri’s title triumph with Leicester last season compared with his own successes.
“I have my career, he [Ranieri] has his career,” Mourinho said. “Ask him if he would change his career with mine. I wouldn’t change mine with his, but … unbelievable achievement, of course.” Van Gaal was not the only one damned with faint praise.
‘It doesn’t matter where I am, everyone expects big things. I like to create that expectation’