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Jose Mourinho Must Get Back the Lion-Tamer’s Edge or All Will Be Lost
- Updated: September 23, 2016
You’re a manager with a big reputation. You are ruthless, self-confident and resolute. You do what it takes. Some people might not like your methods, but nobody can argue with your record.
You’re playing your club’s local rivals. Things aren’t going well. Something is wrong. Maybe it’s your tactics. Maybe it’s the players. Maybe the opposition are just playing brilliantly. But you have to do something.
You go 1-0 down after quarter of an hour. Your team can’t get the ball. A second goal seems inevitable, and there may be more. What do you do? Do you take decisive action, make a substitution or two and change the shape? Yes, it might embarrass those players, but the team needs restructuring. You can talk to them afterward, explain your thinking, tell them the change was tactical and was nothing personal.
Or do you wait until half-time before making the change and hope that things sort themselves out? Do you tell the press you wanted to make the substitutions earlier but realised it would embarrass the players concerned and thereby hang them out to dry anyway?
If you’re Jose Mourinho, you’ve done both. In 2006, during his first stint at Chelsea, he took Joe Cole and Shaun Wright-Phillips off 26 minutes into a game at Fulham. He staunched the flow, turned the game back in Chelsea’s favour. They still lost, 1-0, but they took 16 points from their next six games and were confirmed as champions.
In 2016, at Manchester United, against Manchester City, he hesitated. City scored a second. Had it not been for Claudio Bravo’s error and consequent jitteriness, the balance of the game suggested they would have scored more.
United lost 2-1 and then lost their next two games as well, to Feyenoord in the Europa League and to Watford in the Premier League. Beating Northampton in the EFL Cup on Wednesday did little to dispel the clouds of concern over Old Trafford.
Perhaps it doesn’t matter. There’s a danger always in football of reading too much into too little. Mourinho did lose both games. But in the abstract, which seems preferable: a manager who takes action or one who …
