STILL SPECIAL
United believe Mourinho can turn it around
MANCHESTER UNITED are refusing to give up on Jose Mourinho with senior officials convinced the club can sort out its problems with the embattled manager.
A disastrous pre-season tour of America, a damning outburst from star midfielder Paul Pogba and a poor start to the season, which saw United go down 3-2 at Brighton last Sunday, have placed Mourinho under enormous pressure with the Premier League campaign just two games old.
United chiefs acknowledge there is an issue with their manager but believe executive vice chairman Ed Woodward is the man to sort things out.
The unrest at Old Trafford was not helped by Pogba’s controversial agent Mino Raiola attacking United legend Paul Scholes on social media yesterday.
Raiola claimed the former United and England midfielder ‘wouldn’t recognise a leader if he was in front of Winston Churchill’ after Scholes criticised Pogba’s performance against Brighton.
INTEGRITY in football managers is rare whenever they appear in front of cameras or tape recorders after games have gone awry. There have been some exceptions to the rule and Mick McCarthy, was one of them. When Ireland were mauled in Macedonia over 20 years ago, McCarthy sat with Irish journalists in a rickety stand in Skopje post-match and admitted he got his team wrong and the 3-2 World Cup defeat was his fault, no one else’s. I thought of McCarthy (below) on Sunday night as Jose Mourinho was sifting through the debris of a 3-2 Manchester United defeat at Brighton. The Portuguese peacock spoke of ‘incredible mistakes’ by his players, as he distanced himself from them. That he personally assembled the expensive spine of the team — Eric Bailly (€33.5m), Victor Lindelof (€34.5m), Fred (€75m), Paul Pogba (€105m) and Romelu Lukaku (€84.7m) — was overlooked. If the United boss believes his central defenders are below the standard he desires at United, then why not admit he was wrong to buy them in the first place? It’s not just his signings who are gasping for air under Mourinho. Marcus Rashford, Anthony Martial and Luke Shaw were youngsters on the rise at Old Trafford when he was appointed. Now, they cower in fear, and are become of less use to the club because of it. Clearly, the boss’ bond with his players is fragile, if not entirely non-existent. He has made Pogba captain, as if to appease the World Cup-winning midfielder. In contrast, Pep Guardiola is overseeing a version of happy families across Manchester. Sergio Aguero was the lord of the manor when Guardiola arrived. Not so, warned Pep: Get fit, do more off the ball or you’re out. Aguero knuckled down and at 30, he’s in the shape of his life, a better player than he was under Roberto Mancini or Manuel Pellegrini. How many United players can say they have radically improved under Mourinho? Yet, this is not my fault, he moans. It is Ed Woodward’s fault for not opening up the purse strings to for more expensive signings. Why not front up and accept the bucks stops with him? When Mourinho was appointed United manager 10 days after Guardiola at City in May 2016, it appeared as if the planets were in alignment over Old Trafford. He would run down the touchline again celebrating famous European goals, only this time as a United manager, not as Porto’s. It hasn’t happened and there is little evidence to suggest United will close the gap on either City or Liverpool this season. Last week, Mourinho accused City of lacking class in their documentary of last season’s title win but in doing so, he was, in effect, saying the same about himself. Barring an improbable turnaround, the Mourinho-Manchester marriage is going to end in recrimination, and the fall-out could knock United back for
years.