Muted Mourinho aware United still have a way to go

Refusal to delight in his first major trophy sent out a deliberate message

No prizes for guessing why Jose Mourinho was underwhelmed by his first trophy at Manchester United. The performance was ragged, the prize modest for a double Champions Leaguewinning manager. He was in no rush to encourage the idea that a scraped win over Southampton in a League Cup final should be the limit of United’s ambitions.

This was classic reverse psychology by the man whose appointment last May was announced thus by Ed Woodward, United’s chief executive: “Jose Mourinho is quite simply the best manager in the game today.”

Mourinho had spent much of the build-up to this final extolling the virtues of the English cups – even lecturing fellow foreign managers about their importance. Yet, in the moment of victory, he looked as if he had won a bottle of Blue Nun in the office raffle.

But while Louis van Gaal’s successor plays political games with his players, the rest of us can at least acknowledge United’s recovery under his management. There will be those who say Van Gaal is still ahead of Mourinho by virtue of his FA Cup win last May, hours before he was sacked and Mourinho was appointed in his place. For Van Gaal, the FA Cup was a farewell present; for Mourinho, the EFL Cup ought to be a mere trinket on the road to a renaissance.

Nobody would guarantee it. United are still painfully dependent on Zlatan Ibrahimovic, who scored two of their three goals, including the winner in the 87th minute, with a powerful thrust of his head. Mourinho and Zlatan are quite a pair. One of the new manager’s first acts was to summon the old Swedish nobleman to Manchester in the face of grumbling about his age. Was a then 34-year-old giant really the shape of United’s future? Mourinho never thinks dreamily. He knew United needed an inspirational figure to set the standard for a squad increasingly accustomed to seeing managers come and go (and one, it must be said, not especially animated or determined).

To dismiss this 3-2 victory over Southampton as a mere bagatelle ignores where United were before Mourinho swept in. Yes, they were FA Cup winners, but they were also an unbalanced squad weighed down by transfer market punts – the consequences of which Mourinho is still addressing.

In those first few weeks and months he seemed sour and conflict-addicted.

Sounding like an exiled general who missed his family, he even moaned about his personal life in Manchester. Some thought he had entered a kind of terminal middleage alienation from the thing he used to be so good at, and was about to wreck the joint again, as he had at Chelsea. ‘What’s eating Jose?’ was a common theme in essays about his first autumn at Old Trafford.

What was eating him, probably, was the culture problem in the squad: the lack of edge and dynamism.

Seen from that low starting point, United’s improved league form and this first trophy nine months into his reign assume greater significance. You would not sell your car to watch this United side. They have none of the zip or fizz of Sir Alex Ferguson’s teams. But Mourinho has restored something that went missing: a bottom-line standard of how a Manchester United XI are expected to perform; a basic level of ambition.

United fell below that minimum performance level here at Wembley, which is why Mourinho