Well, I say "the Monday Moan" and "is back", but to clarify, this Monday morning, all is well at Chelsea Football Club. The time when my Monday Moans were a weekly occurrence date back to that painful period between 8 August and 17 December in 2015 when my previous blog involuntarily recorded Chelsea's actual, physical, literal, visible decline, from defending league champions to one place above relegation. And, you guessed it, you know why the Moan has been resurrected now.
Manchester United are not, as yet, in danger of relegation and I very much doubt they ever will be. But the toxicity José Mourinho is currently creating around the club is absurdly identical to that he generated in his final months at Chelsea, which even kamikaze pilots would have regarded as a reckless trajectory. But it wasn’t just at Chelsea: look at how things fell apart at Real Madrid, when the club’s galacticos rejected Mourinho’s defensive tactics. When he left, and Zinedine Zidane took over, Madrid went on to win three Champions League titles. Funny that. Oh, and who is now being rumoured to be of interest in Manchester?
Literally everyone (OK, an exaggeration, but almost) said it would happen like this: pundits and saloon bar sages alike predicted that José would repeat the three-year cycle he's rolled through seemingly everywhere else - arrive, rebuild, win something, implode - after he'd spent most of his time immediately post-Chelsea positioning himself to be United’s next manager (a job, at the time, already filled by the hapless Louis van Gaal). But once he’d installed himself and his usual entourage of assistants at Old Trafford, hardly anyone expected things to go any differently to that which played out so vividly at Chelsea.
Seeing Mourinho go to Manchester United was like watching some celebrity car crash of a marriage - a tabloid bad boy and a TOWIE bimbo getting jiggy with it on Big Brother, followed by some lovey-dovey appearances together on The Graham Norton Show before it all goes badly wrong with a drunken shouting match outside China Whites. That’s where things stand now between Mourinho and - not just Paul Pogba, but mainly - several players he’s publicly vilified.
Clearly, though, the focus is on the battle of wills between Mourinho and the £89 million Pogba, a player the manager had been reluctant to take on in the first place, and is now making that abundantly clear. Pogba, for his part, hasn’t helped with his own attitude: getting caught larking about on Instagram while your side is going out of the League Cup to lower league opposition is not conducive, especially with a manager as capricious as Mourinho. Pogba’s public criticisms of United performances, such as the 1-1 draw with Wolves, have been either naive or unnecessarily (and riskily) antagonistic. No wonder Mourinho took the captaincy off him. However, left back Luke Shaw’s own seething assessment of United’s performance the other day against West Ham is another sign of the growing dissent within the Manchester United camp that is tearing the club apart. Shaw, himself, has been criticised by Mourinho, so for him to have a pop back appears to be particularly open war-like. Add to the list Anthony Martial, of whom Mourinho criticised for being “not very, very focused on his defensive duties”, and Alexis Sánchez, who was given a dressing down in front of the entire United Squad. In the same team meeting Mourinho laid into the saintly Juan Mata, the player he’d shipped off to United when Chelsea manager (much to the fans’ displeasure), whose future looked bleek when Mourinho followed him there, but whose worth to the Portuguese has, though, been one of the soothing ointments to his time as United boss. Not surprisingly, the smart, intelligent Mata has - along with fellow Chelsea emigré Nemanja Matic - been running diplomacy in the fractured dressing room, trying to sew unity for the sake of the team’s future, though not necessarily for the manager’s future.
Manchester United maintains that Mourinho’s job is not in danger, and on paper it would be absurd for any club to sack a manager after just seven league games, let alone Manchester United (not a sacking club) getting rid of a manager as big as Mourinho. But is Mourinho that big? The Special One clearly has had it - and loves reminding everyone of what ‘it’ is - but the build-win-implode cycle surely now has been found out. What club would, now, be mad enough to bet on the certainty of Mourinho repeating the pattern again if they took him on? And given United’s normal reluctance to make any changes until the end of a season, how bad do things need to get before they are forced into the decision Chelsea had to make on 17 December 2015, having lost nine of 16 Premier League matches, and generating “palpable discord” with his players.
One big difference between then and now was that there weren’t any Chelsea players speaking so brazenly in public. Diego Costa’s flounce with a warm-up bib against Spurs at the end of the November that year was the first real sign of the discord Michael Emenalo would speak of three weeks later. Now, the concerns - mostly private but some less so - of United’s players are becoming known. Mourinho and his assistant managers have a Herculean task ahead of them to bring harmony to this group. If they don’t, it will only get worse, as will the results. And then, Manchester United may just be forced into making an unprecedented decision, one we Chelsea fans have grown used to, but to the Old Trafford faithful, only now getting used to life without Alex Ferguson, such a rupture mid-season would be unthinkable (“nonsense” according to the club). For now, it is, but let’s see what happens come the end of this week.
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