WHY CAN’T JOSE SHOW POGBA LOVE? World Cup winner is getting nothing but a hard time already
FOR Paul Pogba, winning the World Cup with France should be an opportunity to elevate his gilded football career to a new level.
Here in Los Angeles, however, his manager only seems interested in taking Manchester United’s record £89million signing down a peg or two. Jose Mourinho’s comments about Pogba over the last week have only served to emphasise the awkward relationship between these two strong but very different characters.
Twice Mourinho has been asked about Pogba’s success with France in Russia, and twice he has used the opportunity to make veiled comments about the player upping his game to a similar level for United.
Asked again yesterday how United can get the best out of Pogba, Mourinho told ESPN: ‘I don’t think it’s about us getting the best out of him, it’s about him giving the best he has to give.’
The Portuguese then launched unprompted into an assessment of Pogba’s performance at the World Cup that hinted at his concerns over the player’s lack of focus for United.
It is known Pogba’s large entourage does not sit comfortably with Mourinho (below) and his staff. Nor does the obsession with social media and a liking for flamboyant haircuts and over-the-top dance moves.
Focusing on France for a month is one thing, suggested Mourinho, but United need Pogba to be concentrated and committed for a whole season. ‘I think the World Cup is the perfect habitat for a player like him to give the best,’ he said.
‘Why? Because it’s closed for a month, where he can only think about football. Where he’s with his team on the training camp, completely isolated from the external world, where they focus just on football, where the dimensions of the game can only motivate.
‘During a season, you can have a big match, then a smaller match, then one even smaller, then you can lose your focus, you can lose your concentration. Then comes a big match again.
‘In the World Cup, the direction of the emotion, of the responsibility, of the big decisions is always growing up. This feeds the motivation and the concentration of a player. So it was the perfect environment for him.
‘At the same time, I think players in the World Cup, they really feel that extra commitment with a country, with the people, that extra responsibility that makes them — by the emotional point of view — to be sometimes even overcommitted. So they play for the team, and only for the team, and the team is the most important thing, and they do everything to try to succeed. So it’s the perfect environment for a talented player like him to fully focus on the job.’
A simple compliment would have sufficed, but instead Mourinho went searching for negatives.
It will not have gone unnoticed by Pogba, who is on holiday in LA but will not train with his team-mates again until they return to England.
Nor will it do anything to ease the friction between the two after the 25-year-old midfielder was left out of the team on several occasions in the second half of last season.
That Pogba then went on to play a key role in France’s World Cup triumph this summer is an awkward issue for Mourinho. If Didier Deschamps can show the player a little love and get the best out of him, then why not the United manager? When Mourinho was asked last week what Pogba’s success at international level could mean for his club career, he responded by saying the midfielder needs to ‘understand’ why he did well in Russia and bring that approach to United. The message: Pogba needs to learn from what he did at the World Cup, not me. Given an opportunity later in the day at United’s training base at UCLA to clarify his comments and explain what Pogba needs to do to make him happy, Mourinho replied curtly: ‘I told you already.’
Compare his approach with the newly released footage of Pep Guardiola firing up his team in the dressing room on the upcoming Manchester City documentary All or
Nothing, and the contrast between the two coaches is plain to see.
While Guardiola is trying to inspire his players, Mourinho too often seeks to keep their confidence in check.
Certainly his mood on tour has threatened to cast a shadow over the blue skies of California.
Once again yesterday, Mourinho bemoaned the lack of first-team players available to him in America after the World Cup, while pointedly refusing to say if the current United squad are capable of challenging for the Premier League title.
It was not the kind of message that the fans, or indeed the board, will want to hear ahead of a crucial season.
Asked if he is getting what he wants from the tour, Mourinho said: ‘No, I don’t have the majority of the players that are going to be in the squad on August 9 when the market closes and we can make the squad official for the season, so of course I’m not happy to have just a few players.
‘If you look to the players that Chelsea and Liverpool have in the pre-season, also Arsenal, you see the difference of the situation.’
It was a gloomy assessment from an increasingly downcast Mourinho. Pogba, for one, will not be surprised at what he is hearing.