Mourinho just can’t stop talking

Former manager Jose Mourinho has come out fighting after his sacking from Manchester United. Oliver Kay reports.

IN his finest moment as Manchester United manager, Jose Mourinho uttered one of his most memorable lines. ‘‘There are many poets in football,’’ he said after victory over Ajax in the 2017 Europa League final, ‘‘but poets, they don’t win many titles.’’

You wonder what Mourinho, sitting glumly in a television studio in Qatar last week, summarising the Asian Cup tournament, makes of the past few weeks in English football since his departure from Old Trafford.

If it is not the cherubic Ole Gunnar Solskjaer (two Norwegian league titles and a Norwegian cup with Molde, and a relegation with Cardiff City) bringing lyrical football and happiness back to Old Trafford, it is Marcelo Bielsa (whose only title this century was with Argentina at the 2004 Olympic Games) being lauded to the heavens for bringing his unique brand of football poetry to Leeds United (even if it seems to have taken the spying controversy at Derby County’s training ground for many people to have noticed it).

Then there is the Premier League title race, in which Jurgen Klopp’s Liverpool are giving Pep Guardiola’s Manchester City a serious run for their money. He has never been Guardiola’s biggest fan and nor does he have a great enthusiasm for the hype surrounding Klopp.

The best story about their rivalry concerns a corporate event in 2016 at which, during a rehearsal, Mourinho took exception to the suggestion that Antonio Conte, Guardiola and Klopp be mentioned in the introduction as great managers in the Premier League.

‘‘Not Klopp,’’ Mourinho reportedly said, asserting that the Liverpool manager was a serial runner-up and that his two Bundesliga titles with Borussia Dortmund barely counted because they came at a time when Bayern Munich were ‘‘shit’’.

It is always thus with Mourinho – his own triumphs utterly heroic, others’ successes easily played down to the extent that his Community Shield victories seem to carry more weight than Guardiola’s or Klopp’s Bundesliga titles – and, really, you can only laugh along with it because it is, in its own way, a form of poetry, or at least stand-up comedy. It is just a shame that, in the final months of his past two postings, at Chelsea and United, he has seemed far more adept at reminding us of his former glories than at the job in hand.

Nobody should really need those constant reminders. He is a brilliant manager. He just didn’t show it at United. A long-held personal view is that, for reasons touched upon by the club’s former midfielder Paddy Crerand, Old Trafford was never the right place for him, but it is debatable whether it would have been the right place for any manager over the five years in which the club, under the Glazer family ownership, has lost its way since Sir Alex Ferguson retired.

As Mourinho told Bein Sports, the club has been in urgent need of a restructuring behind the scenes – to protect the manager from the players’ worst excesses, he suggested, though others would suggest that tempering a manager’s short-termist tendencies with a longterm vision would be far more important.

Mourinho was asked whether he was ready to retire. Seriously? Why would he retire? He will be 56 next week. Sir Matt Busby retired at 59 and Bill Shankly at 60, but Mourinho, a product of a different age, looks and feels like he could keep managing for years. Even his harshest critics should not doubt his response that he is ‘‘too young to retire’’ and that ‘‘I belong to top-level football’’.

Of the handful of super-clubs that he would doubtless regard as his natural habitat, there are probably not too many that you could imagine appointing him in 2019, but a return to Inter Milan or even Real Madrid is possible. If Real were to appoint him, in place of the struggling Santiago Solari, would anyone be surprised to see him lead them to the Champions League title in May?

❚ SOCCEROOS midfielder Aaron Mooy’s Premier League club Huddersfield will not be making any announcements on their managerial vacancy before their home game against Manchester City tomorrow.

The Terriers have been reported by German newspaper Bild to have made an approach for Borussia Dortmund reserves coach Jan Siewert.

Town have refused to comment, but Press Association Sport says the club’s interim boss and youth coach Mark Hudson will definitely be in charge for the visit of Pep Guardiola’s champions.

Siewert is currently in the same under-23s coaching role that departed Terriers boss David Wagner occupied at Dortmund before he joined the Terriers in 2015.

Huddersfield announced Wagner and assistant Christophe Buhler had departed by mutual consent on Tuesday.

Town’s under-23s coach Hudson, 36, has refused to look beyond tomorrow’s tough game.

The former Terriers captain paid tribute to the German, but would not be drawn on his own future.

‘‘I can’t think beyond this game,’’ he said. ‘‘It’s quite a big game.

‘‘It’s one to look forward to for sure, so I’ll be focusing on that. If we get a result it will be for the players and the club and that would be fantastic.’’

A run of eight successive Premier League defeats, halted in last week’s goal-less draw at Cardiff, has left the Terriers eight points adrift of safety at the foot of the table.

Their 28-year-old Australian playmaker has also been out injured since Huddersfield’s 1-0 loss to Arsenal in early December.

But Mooy is expected to return to Huddersfield’s relegation dogfight in February.

Hudson insisted the Terriers’ survival fight was not a lost cause.

‘‘Without belief there’s no point being in this industry. I thoroughly believe in the players and what they’ve got, that we can pose a threat to teams.’’

THE TIMES, LONDON