LOOK OUT... IT’S JOSE, ALL GUNS BLAZING
Forget the stats — United’s new boss is the man to beat the odds
AT Manchester United’s training ground, there is a new medical and sports science facility, costing £25million. Since the arrival of Jose Mourinho it has been increasingly underused.
Not the medical department, obviously. Despite what some believe, Mourinho doesn’t think he knows more than the doctors. Injuries are treated and recovery programmes go on just the same.
It is the sports science facility that does not see as much of the management as before. Louis Van Gaal and David Moyes were big believers in statistical analysis; Mourinho isn’t. He prefers to trust what he sees.
United players no longer arrive to reams of print-outs on their physical state, because Mourinho will look at training and decide who is tired. There is even a suggestion that the GPS tracking devices that monitor the progress of each player through a match may have disappeared, or at the very least the information is no longer pored over by the manager.
Sky’s experts may want to know how far Wayne Rooney has run against Bournemouth tomorrow but Mourinho doesn’t. He will judge the performance with his own eyes.
And those who fancy Mourinho to land Manchester United’s first title since the departure of Sir Alex Ferguson will do the same. They will judge Mourinho’s track record for first-season triumphs, the powerful signings he has made, the absence of exhausting Champions League football — although the Europa League is taxing in its own way — his reputation as a front-runner, his Premier League experience, and, placing all these unquantifiable factors together, will arrive at Manchester United’s 21st championship win, and their first with a foreign coach.
Go back to the numbers and United are far from a sure thing. The occasions in the modern era when a team has jumped from outside the top four to first in English football, are few. In the Premier League era, Leicester stand alone.
What we have come to regard as the miracle year is the only time a team has come from beyond the existing elite to triumph. Before that, one would have to go back to 1984-85 when Howard Kendall’s Everton rose from seventh place to first to find a comparable jump. Leeds came fourth the year before winning the title in 1991-92, as did Arsenal in 1990-91, but in the Premier League a rise of even two places to the title is exceptional.
Before Leicester’s leap from 14th only five teams had achieved a title win from so much as a third-placed finish: Chelsea (2014-15), Manchester City (2010-11), Chelsea (200910), Manchester United (2002-03) and Arsenal (1997-98). Excluding the sensation that was Leicester, then, the average climb made by Premier League champions is 1.18 places — pretty much from second to first.
So Mourinho has his work cut out. Just as Tiger Woods never won a major that he wasn’t leading going into the last day, so Premier League champions, with one notable exception, have tended to be within the Champions League pack when making their move.
Perhaps this is why even Mourinho describes United’s title challenge as unrealistic. He used the word while continuing to set the title as his aim. ‘I’ve created some unrealistic targets,’ he added. ‘By doing that you push the team to unexpected levels. To win the Champions League with Inter Milan or Porto is unexpected, too, as is winning the league in the first season. But I like that.’
So do we. A lot of people think the media likes Mourinho because he gives good copy. It isn’t that. He gives good league. He makes the competition sizzle. With Pep Guardiola at Manchester City, Jurgen Klopp in his first full season at Liverpool and Antonio Conte installed at Chelsea, Manchester United knew they needed their own Premier League gunslinger. Van Gaal, a man who had taken United fourth, then fifth, wasn’t it.
Mourinho ups the ante, not least by keeping up the pressure for squad improvement. Would another manager have pressed for an £89m signing such as Paul Pogba (left), knowing the focus it brings? Would another manager take on the ego of Zlatan Ibrahimovic, and balance it with the differing accommodations of Rooney, Marcus Rashford and Anthony Martial?
United are not the only club with money, yet, once again, the start of the season begins with Arsenal racing to complete their business, as they haggle over a £28m bid for Valencia central defender Shkodran Mustafi. Arsenal have suffered rotten luck with injuries at the back in recent weeks, but even so, this has long been considered a position that needs strengthening. Why so late, again?
Manchester City would appear to have cornered the market in injured players. Ilkay Gundogan was bought knowing he would miss the start of the season, but Leroy Sane has joined him with a hamstring injury, meaning Guardiola will be without £90m of new signings for today’s game against Sunderland — including players who were bought, and immediately shipped out on loan.
City are understandably the title favourites, and Guardiola’s apparent naivety about English conditions may well be an act — he’s too smart to be unprepared — but the season begins with a tricky balancing act, this afternoon’s match followed so quickly by a visit to Steaua Bucharest in a Champions League qualifier.
Liverpool will be a greater danger this year, too, Klopp given a full pre-season to attain the physical levels needed to implement the demands of his high-energy pressing game. Klopp insists this is now his squad and there are no excuses — not even the Anfield rebuilding programme which means they cannot play a home game until September 10. Liverpool could be difficult first opponents unless Arsenal’s makeshift defence is wellmarshalled tomorrow.
Considering that Claudio Ranieri’s joke about there being more chance of ET landing than Leicester retaining their title is probably, if sadly, right, then the fortunes of Tottenham will be equally intriguing. They ended their title challenge last season in disarray at Chelsea, even slipped behind Arsenal, falling to third on the final day of the season, and it is fair to say many of their key players did not summer well. Specifically, the English ones.
For a team built around the strengths of Harry Kane, Dele Alli, Eric Dier, Kyle Walker and Danny Rose, a failure at the European Championship was always going to have consequences. How great, manager Mauricio Pochettino will discover when his team takes the field at Everton today.
The lasting contempt for the national team among some Manchester United fans can be traced to the reception their players would
get around the country after a poor tournament. The greatness of those same players was encapsulated in their consistently outstanding performances despite this — David Beckham should have been the Footballer of the Year the season after the 1998 World Cup — and the fact that they always came back for more with England.
Are Kane (below) and Alli of the same mould? After several seasons of adulation, is Kane ready for the taunts and chants that Beckham or the Neville brothers had to ride? Pochettino has already said he thinks Kane was made a scapegoat, and the manager is yet to experience that kind of atmosphere at Premier League grounds.
Certainly, Tottenham will have to show greater maturity in the face of hostility than they did at Stamford Bridge last season if they are to contend again.
If the title is a close call, at the other end of the table there seems to be a racing certainty: Hull to be relegated. Opinions vary on the other unfortunates — Burnley, Swansea, Watford, West Brom, Sunderland, all in the mix — but Hull are on every checklist, and understandably so. With owner Assem Allam seriously ill, stewardship has fallen to his son, Ehab Allam and — all mitigating circumstances aside — he has performed dreadfully. Steve Bruce, the manager, left because he could no longer work with such a depleted squad, players have been lost to Championship clubs and recruitment minimal. At a pre-season camp, defender Curtis Davies took a mocking photograph of the Hull squad, featuring nine players. There is talk of panicked lastminute signings, and a Chinese takeover in September, but it is too late. One hopes the new owners realise they are not purchasing a franchise — rumoured to be the mistake made by Blackburn owners Venky’s — and that relegation can result from inadequate executive management; because it surely will. Yet with so many managerial heavyweights duking it out, it is the top of the Premier League that will capture the attention. My fancy: Manchester United. I’m not a big believer in the certainty of statistics, either — or the certainty of much else, after what happened to Leicester last season. You have been warned.