I'm not even considering the fact that Tottenham beat Manchester United 3-0 at Old Trafford last night, nor even how they did it. Sorry, Spuds fans, this one's not about you. José Mourinho made sure of that. It wasn’t necessarily about how Manchester United lost at home, either. It is - because it always is - all about José.
Turning up half an hour early for his press conference the other day only to stick around long enough to deliver a handful of surly answers; then last night, almost theatrically applauding the home fans after the match was over, lapping up their adulation as if what had happened in the previous 90 minutes or so hadn’t mattered one bit; and then another post-match presser in which The Sulky One asked of the assembled [on time] journalists: "What was the score?" before angrily holding up three fingers and asking "What is this also? Three Premierships I have won, more Premierships than the other 19 managers put together. Me three, them two," followed by "Respect, respect, respect", repeated as he made his exit.
The fact is, if José wants respect, he’s got to show some himself. On Sunday Genovese fans maintained silence for the first 43 minutes of Genoa's home fixture to Empoli, one minute for every victim of the Morandi bridge collapse. Now that is respect. Respect is earned or deserved, not petulantly demanded from journalists asking legitimate questions about how Manchester United managed to lose at their supposed home fortress to one of the Top 6 by a three-goal margin. Yes, it's only three games into the season, and a season's results can never be gauged over just 270 minutes of football at the sunburned end of the term, but it's worth pointing out that in Mourinho’s first season at Chelsea the team conceded just 15 league goals all season. Whether by parking the bus or not, Chelsea were ultra-disciplined at the back, and ultra-watertight. Manchester United are already halfway towards that goal record, and we're not yet out of August.
Whatever it is causing Manchester United to be so poor, the root lies with Mourinho. Once again, he has adopted the truculent manner that led to "palpable discord" between him and his Chelsea players in that disastrous, four-month nosedive in defence of the 2014-15 Premier League title. It left Chelsea in 17th place at the point of Mourinho's departure...ironically, following another defeat to Tottenham. That was when Third Season Syndrome became a thing: it was the realisation that in Season 1 he builds, Season 2 he achieves and in Season 3 it all falls apart. Well, this is a blockbuster Netflix would probably pass over. Because Season 2’s pattern was ignored, mainly by the supposedly classless Manchester City.
Mourinho’s demeanour last night as he boorishly lectured journalists was nothing new. This wasn’t a sudden, Keeganesque implosion, one where sympathy might be afforded Mourinho’s mental state. No, because this is José. When he first appeared on these shores in 2004 to declare himself a "special one", the press went giddy. Sports desks ordered extra notepads from stationery departments at the lip-smacking prospect of a new and highly quotable Clough, funded by Roman Abramovich’s largesse, and with success with Porto behind him to underwrite the hype. And so he delivered Chelsea’s first league title in 50 years, and then another. Buying the league? Nah. We loved him, and sang ebulliently from the Stamford Bridge stands, “José Mourinho! José Mourinho!”. And then, within a few weeks of The Third Season starting, he was gone. One indifferent performance in the Champions League, and mutterings of discontent over Avram Grant’s role as Director of Football, and club and manager parted company.
The cycle was in full effect, and thus it would repeat itself at Internazionale and Real Madrid, coming back to Chelsea in what might seem now like an ill-fated marriage of convenience in 2013. But this was no Burton and Taylor giving it yet another go: the suspicion was always that José coveted the-then unavailable Manchester United job. So Chelsea just had to do. And so he dutifully added another Premier League title before it all went horribly wrong on the opening day of the 2015-16 season, and José jumped up and down like a enraged, tanned Basil Fawlty as Dr. Eva Carneiro and her assistant ran onto the pitch to attend the felled Eden Hazard. This was just 8 August. And it set the tone for the next four months, with Mourinho publically demoting Carneiro, and team morale disappearing before our very eyes. Week after week, the Mourinho mood worsened, some genuinely fearing for his mental state as press conferences and post-match interviews became increasingly monosyllabic. All leading up to the inevitable parting of the ways and Michael Emenalo's extraordinary admission of discord between manager and players. On that occasion there was suspicion that Mourinho had engineered the whole thing to get himself out of his Chelsea contract and onto the radar of Manchester United's HR department (despite there being no vacancy to fit his experience and talents). The idea of Mourinho attempting 'suicide by cop' by appearing to invite Roman Abrmovich to fire him might seem extreme, but if there's one thing we know about José, there are no rules for him to follow. There are times when everything about him seems staged and contrived; even his march last night to the Stretford End looked rehearsed, at least in his mind, to calculate maximum effect when he faced the press afterwards.
There was a time when we believed that all of this egomaniacal behaviour was a distraction, that by pulling the supertrooper onto him, Mourinho would deflect attention away from his players. But if there's one thing we took out of that dismal four months in 2015, his actions did everything but. He was, by all accounts, a miserable sod to be around, and that appears to have replicated itself over the summer at United. Even if he managed, miraculously, to get Paul Pogba onside, that scowl and the apparently demeaning comments about some of his players will have been felt throughout the squad.
So, three games in to this season and we have already reached the level of petulance that provided the weekly narrative of those final few months of Mourinho’s time at Chelsea. Chelsea’s PR people must have needed counselling during that period and I can see United’s media team going in the same direction. Surely Manchester United must be alerted to the warning signs? Could he be sacked sooner than later? Logic says he won't go just yet: even in this insane world of football, three games - one of which won - does not lead to dismissal. But the look on executive vice chairman Ed Woodward's face at the final whistle yesterday was not one of stoic reflection. Even if, as the Daily Mail has revealed today, he and Mourinho had a "positive" conversation, drawing on United's first-half performance, rather than its second-half collapse, there surely must be those in the Old Trafford board room wondering whether history is repeating itself before their very eyes, and not necessarily in the best way, either...
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