Jose Mourinho shifts blame on to lacklustre Man United players

Jose Mourinho is trying to reclaim the narrative at Old Trafford, to help the world to understand it is all someone else’s fault.

Manchester United manager Jose Mourinho at the Carrington training complex this week

Jose Mourinho spoke on Monday of looking around the Manchester United dressing room and seeing three groups within his squad: “sad people”, “people that don’t look like they lost the game” and others “so-so”. He briefly backtracked, pointing out that humans can be good at concealing how they feel inside, but then he reinforced his original point. “I think that some care more than others,” he said.

Some would call it a statement of the bleeding obvious, given how they have performed lately. Others, perhaps, a justified deflection of the blame.

This being Mourinho, you could offer half a dozen different interpretations and they may all be right. He is trying to shift the spotlight, trying to provoke a reaction against Valencia in the Champions League today (5am AEST) and trying to reclaim control of the narrative at Old Trafford, to help the world to understand that, as always, it will be someone else’s fault if he fails to turn the tide.

Certainly something is wrong in the United dressing room. We can all point out the lack of speed, fluency and finesse in this squad, and it has long appeared that this is just how Mourinho likes it, but equally striking in the 3-1 West Ham loss was an absence of spirit.

Paul Scholes said on BT Sport that there was no hunger or desire about this team. Rio Ferdinand, a fellow veteran of the glory years under Alex Ferguson, said: “I don’t see enough players working hard.”

These are damning words — damning not just of the multi-talented but infuriating Paul Pogba, the usual butt of criticism from the United old boy network, but of an entire group of players who have appeared to be going through the motions. The Times revealed on Monday that, according to the criteria of the data analysts Opta, they registered just 59 sprints against West Ham, far fewer than any other team in the English Premier League on Saturday. Thirteen of that total were from Luke Shaw, a player whose attitude and mentality Mourinho has questioned more than anyone’s. To put that figure of 59 in context, in the later match at Stamford Bridge, Chelsea and Liverpool registered 119 and 154 respectively.

You only had to look at Mourinho’s team selection on Saturday — an abundance of six footers, few of whom have ever conformed to the “good feet for a big man” cliche — to conclude that he has given up any pretence of seeking a high-intensity approach, but even with no expectations of swashbuckling soccer, this was a team that was barely going through the motions.

How we laughed a couple of years ago when Pep Guardiola, with his disregard for English football’s muck-and-nettles culture, asked: “What is tackles?”. Mourinho’s team made just nine tackles. West Ham made 25.

It was a dreadful performance, but Mourinho says his players were giving their all. “After 20 years of football, I’m still the kid I was 20 years ago, and I’m still naive, but I still don’t believe that a player is not honest,” he said.

“I said this to your BT Sport colleague — a channel with lots of men who were big players in the past — and I said to ask these people if at any time they went to a game not to give their maximum, not to help the club, not to make the fans happy, not to give their best. I will always believe the players are honest players who want to give their best. If they do it or don’t do it, that’s a different story.”

The contradiction here is that no manager in the EPL, no elite manager in world soccer, is less tolerant, less forgiving of a player having an off day. No top-class manager is more distrustful of top-class footballers. We could ask Ferdinand and Scholes whether they ever, even subconsciously gave less than 100 per cent, but surely Mourinho suspects, even more than the rest of us suspect, that some of their successors are not made of strong stuff.

We can only speculate whom Mourinho had in mind when he suggested that some players “care more than others”. In the former group, presumably, would be Nemanja Matic, whom he described last season as “an island of personality and desire and control, surrounded by a lack of personality, class and desire”. The former Chelsea player is one of his most trusted foot-soldiers, but he performed as poorly as anyone on Saturday. Of that alarming tally of just nine United tackles, he did not make one. Neither did he make a single interception. He said on Monday it was “one of the worst games since I signed for Manchester United”.

If even Magic is failing to perform, then it all sounds alarmingly similar to the collapse that occurred at Chelsea three years ago, when Mourinho was sacked in December with his team, the champions, just one point off the relegation zone. Things are nothing like that bad — and, with back-to-back home games against Valencia and Newcastle United there really should be an upturn this week — but it is still troubling when the results have been so poor and the performances even worse.

“I don’t think with talking you can resolve something,” Magic said. “The leaders need to be on the pitch. The leaders are the players who are not scared to play. In the next games we will see who are the leaders.”

Mourinho already knows who the leaders are, and there are simply not enough of them. What must worry him even more is that he seems to be losing followers, too. Too many players look like they are waiting for something to change. Mourinho is not going to change. Increasingly he finds himself resorting to dramatic gestures, in terms of team selections, and statements in the hope that something will spark his team back to life. “Big match, big week,” Mourinho said. He is not wrong.

The Times