Jose Mourinho’s early struggles at Manchester United hint ‘Special One’ may now be anything but

EARLY TACKLE: Jose Mourinho is looking anything but special as he struggles to make an instant impact at Old Trafford. And the knives are already sharpening ...

Jose Mourinho hasn’t had the kind of instant impact at Manchester United many had assumed was all but guaranteed.

IN a week when Jose Mourinho evoked no lesser figure than Albert Einstein to have a dig at his growing band of critics, it is a theory other than that of relativity which has been doing the rounds, quietly but with growing resonance: that ‘The Special One’, just maybe, is special no more.

After three defeats on the bounce for Mourinho’s Manchester United side, a small degree of respite was granted via a perfunctory win over third tier Northampton Town in the League Cup. Mourinho decided against fronting the media after that match, despite the modest glow of respectability the result offered, the official, petty reason given that he ‘was not contractually obliged to do so’ in that particular competition.

He did, however, speak to United’s in-house TV channel, where he launched to slightly bizarre critique of the modern game and commentary on it.

“I know that some football Einsteins — football is full of Einsteins — I know that they tried to delete 16 years of my career,” Mourinho told MUTV.

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“They tried to delete an unbelievable history of Man United Football Club and to focus on a bad week with three bad results. But that’s the new football — it’s full of Einsteins.”

true enough, one bad week does not make Mourinho a bad manager. Far from it. The Portuguese’s trophy-laden career affords him enduring respect, even if the manner of his methods has left him short of affection from rival supporters.

Yet it is an inescapable fact that in the opening stages of his United career something appears to be amiss. The cocksure arrogance is disconcertingly absent. His trademark fostering of belligerent team spirit, his knack of taking all focus of negative results upon himself to protect his players, has given way to hanging individuals out to dry, as Luke Shaw recently discovered.

Even with the addition of one of the game’s biggest personalities in Zlatan Ibrahimovic and the most expensive player on the planet in Paul Pogba, he has failed to inject United with the kind of bravado and direction expected. Team-building takes time. But Mourinho has long traded on his ability to make an instant impact.

Mourinho has looked a shadow of his former bullish self so far this season.

One explanation for the early season false steps is that his meltdown with Chelsea, and before that with Real Madrid, has taken a toll. Chastened by periods of failure, the unshakable ego has been softened. Uncertainty has crept in.

Another is that the United job, the one he craved so deeply he reportedly shed tears when overlooked on a previous occasion, is too big for him now. Unrivalled in galvanising relative outsiders (Porto, his first tilt with Chelsea and Inter Milan), his alchemy is less effective when managing superstar squads at clubs where success is measured in more than just trophies but also in upholding tradition and philosophy (Real and United).

The game has moved on from when Mourinho last was considered the finest exponent of his craft. Others have taken the mantle and run with it, not least in the urbane sophistication of the man now ensconced across the city, Pep Guardiola, so ruthlessly and emphatically underlined in their first meeting in the Premier League where Mourinho and his side were second best in all aspects of the contest.

It is foolish, of course, as Mourinho himself rightly suggests, to rush to definitive conclusions after a handful of games. But with City so quickly in to their stride in the Guardiola era, time is not on his side. And it is not just the defeats that have prompted questions to be asked, but Mourinho’s lack of effervescence on the touchline, his passivity during matches, and uncharacteristic excuse making — blaming his own players rather than referees — in the wake of them.

Rooney has been a peripheral figure, at best, for United in recent matches.

Perhaps most damming of all, however, is his willing blindness to a problem that everyone else can see in neon clarity, that Wayne Rooney is not so much a passenger in this United team as an active handbrake on any progress.

Whether Mourinho is unwilling to ruffle feathers and dispatch an icon to the bench so early in his United tenure (something he would have positively relished in earlier incarnations) or he mistakenly believes Rooney in the first eleven is helpful to his cause is almost an irrelevance. Either explanation suggests something has been lost from his managerial armoury.

Obituaries are prematurely written in the circus of the Premier League and history suggests Mourinho is a man more capable than most of defying his critics, and revelling in doing so.

As Tiger Woods was famously once paid to say — and Mourinho once made a mantra: ‘Winning takes care of everything.’ It’s just that at the moment he and United are not. That needs to change swiftly, starting with the visit of champions Leicester this weekend, if a full-blown crisis is not to engulf him before he’s properly got his feet under his new desk.

Originally published as Jose Mourinho’s early struggles at Manchester United hint ‘Special One’ may now be anything but