Never apologise, never explain. There is no doubt a view José Mourinho functions best when he is under pressure, when the vice begins to bite around his temples. This, though, was a self‑inflicted shunt a little further into a José-shaped corner.
Mourinho was pointedly relaxed, unruffled, even jarringly smiley after this 2-0 defeat by Arsenal, massaging the debate around both United’s selection and also their lack of drive against a team they have traditionally spent 90 minutes trying to throttle.
But the fact is this was an opportunity missed, or at least an opportunity un‑seized, grabbed at with insufficient desperation. However Mourinho might try to spin it, by the time the final whistle blew at the Emirates Stadium a late-breaking route into Champions League qualification had been passed up by the failure of this much-changed United team to engage fully with the idea of actually winning this match.
Never mind the surrounding headlines, the misdirection of Mourinho’s slighting comments about Arsène Wenger at the end of his press conference. The fact is at 3.45pm, with Liverpool having drawn 0-0 at home against Southampton, United looked to have stumbled across an unexpected second chance to sneak into the top four, in the process potentially displacing their greatest rivals and cashing in a feel-good bonus at the end of a stodgy but still occasionally uplifting season.
At that moment Champions League qualification was in United’s hands. They still have to play Tottenham Hotspur but then Spurs looked like a team rapidly losing air on Friday night, their season run. It would have been a tall order to steam through those final four league matches. But this is surely what football is for, what Manchester United are for, what league campaigns are about, why an elite band of highly paid coaches are allowed to flounce around in an attitude of toxic tortured genius. Because a violent, non‑negotiable desperation to win games is what happens at the end of it.
Or apparently not. Instead Mourinho stuck with his pre-cooked, pre‑advertised strategy of fielding not just a weakened team but one that seemed to have been bled of all intensity. Arsenal have lost a game a week for the past two months. This is a team palpably there for the taking but they were allowed to gather themselves after a slow start and pick United off while they dozed.
Mourinho had made eight changes from the team that started against Celta Vigo and in fairness their best player was the most surprising of them, the 19-year-old Axel Tuanzebe, in at right‑back for his first start. Tuanzebe had a fine game: calm, athletic, slick on the ball and more or less untroubled by the presence of Alexis Sánchez.
This was a team selected with the ghosts of Celta Vigo and Ajax lurking just out of sight. It was also a pretty strong-looking weakened team, just perhaps with a little too much ring rust in one place. Mourinho was also ill served by some weak performances from senior players. Anthony Martial was given a run at centre-forward and had all the impact of a man-sized marshmallow effigy of a £50m footballer hurled from a motorway bridge at a passing lorry. Wayne Rooney was energetically ponderous.
The end result was a match that had plenty of action but was also oddly tepid. At times it felt like a close-season charity game, Michael Carrick Testimonial All-Stars against a Danny Welbeck XI. Looking down, one half-expected to see the drummer from McBusted preparing to come on or a well-known YouTube Vlogger being brutally kicked up in the air by Phil Jones.
With half an hour gone the temperature was raised briefly by Wayne Rooney’s amusingly creaky attempt to hack down Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain near the touchline. Legs pumping desperately, Rooney landed on his back, studs flailing, like a venerable old family dog dozing in its basket and having a dream about chasing cats.
For a while a game of football broke out as Arsenal roused themselves. After half- time they scored twice. The first was a deflected Granit Xhaka shot that dropped in a slow parabola past David De Gea’s hand. The second was a fine bullet header from Welbeck, given too much space in the middle.
And so farewell then to the weirdest 25-game unbeaten streak around, not so much an unbeaten run as an unbeaten jog the wrong way along an airport travelator, going nowhere, meaning very little and now likely to remain just a peculiar footnote.
United may well go on to win the Europa League. It will be a fine, redemptive feat of management if it happens, transforming the season into a late-breaking triumph. Either way this felt like a failure to engage, not to mention a perversion of the rapacious winning history of a club that really should be baring its teeth at the league season from first to last.
Mourinho should surely be pursuing with absolute, draining desperation the chance to nudge his team ahead of Liverpool. As it is, United will finish the season having scored a combined total of zero goals away to Manchester City, Chelsea, Liverpool and Arsenal; and with triumph in the Europa League not just an alluring side-plot but a narrowing necessity.
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