If one wanted to be charitable about it, maybe out of gratitude for all those verbal donations that José Mourinho says he makes to football Einsteins, one could suggest this was just one of those occasions when Manchester United fell foul of the Law of Murphy, as Louis van Gaal used to put it. You could even point to the referee, Martin Atkinson, for evidence to back up the Bad Day at the Office theory, as he booked Eric Bailly for being on the scene of a tumble by Diego Costa and then gave the same punishment to David Luiz for lunging into Marouane Fellaini’s knee like a violent Cossack dancer.
But that would be bunkum and only a fool would buy it. The truth is that this miserable performance exposed deep problems at Manchester United. Mourinho was accused by some purists of besmirching United’s culture with his ultra-negative approach at Anfield on Monday but at least his team had an identity there. At Stamford Bridge, by contrast, United were a rabble without a cause. Or a team without the ability or willingness to implement whatever plan they had. They were slow and ragged and their body language was not the sort of thing that should have been televised before the watershed.
That much was made clear within 30 seconds, when Chris Smalling and Daley Blind dithered and allowed Pedro to pilfer the ball and canter round David de Gea to open the scoring. The second goal was no better, Ander Herrera being surprised by a bouncing ball before Smalling turned away and Gary Cahill converted from close range under no pressure. There was slackness preceding Chelsea’s third and fourth goals, too. And in general United misplaced many passes, made few tackles and were outfought and out-thought. If Mourinho thought that the back-to-basics success at Liverpool gave him something to build on, that notion went out the window in the first minute here and was never retrieved.
Incessant mistakes from players such as Smalling and Blind underlined concerns about the ability of United’s defence to sustain solidity across two tough away games let alone a season. But more alarming was the fact that so many United players did not appear to know what they were supposed to be doing. Marcus Rashford surely did not envisage spending so long as an auxiliary left-back giving chase to Victor Moses; Zlatan Ibrahimovic is not going to end his scoreless streak by constantly dropping deep in the manner of fin de carrière Wayne Rooney; and Paul Pogba was an expensive passenger that United cannot afford to keep carrying.
The first thing to say here is that even if players are uncomfortable in their role they need to show the gumption to run around and put in tackles – to fight. Here so many players, most glaringly Pogba, meekly accepted Chelsea’s superiority that it raised questions about their personalities before any consideration was given to formation and team selection. Maybe Mourinho was not blowing smoke, after all, when he said earlier this season that he needed to protect his squad because many of his players were very sensitive to criticism. A lot of them seemed soft here.
But maybe, also, Mourinho is not helping as much as he should. Maybe his decisions are not bringing much clarity or support. He inherited a squad with deficiencies and a lack of balance but so did Antonio Conte and the Italian, despite getting less backing in terms of transfers, seems closer to a solution and has more visible buy-in from his players.
At Stamford Bridge, as at Vicarage Road in September and several other times this season, United have looked nothing like the team of specialists that Mourinho said during the summer that he wanted to build. And again there was no sign of one of the four players that Mourinho asked for and was given before the start of the campaign: Mourinho has said that Henrikh Mkhitaryan does not yet have enough match fitness to compete with Premier League intensity but that does not seem a valid reason for omitting such a high-class player when so many of United’s starters lacked intensity, too.
A similar point might be made about Michael Carrick, who was left out here despite an excellent performance against Fenerbahce in the Europa League on Thursday, after which Mourinho praised him for providing, yes, “balance” and “intensity”.
United, in sum, put in the sort of performance that is commonly seen at the start of a managerial reign – or the end of one. The thing is, of course, that United are not a common-or-garden club, this is a particularly impatient age and they and Mourinho attract special demands. So the manager needs to find a way quickly of getting the best out of an imperfect squad. The suggestion that Mourinho is out of sync with modern football is not necessarily correct – look at how Leicester won last season’s Premier League, how Portugal won the European Championships or even how Chelsea won here – but at the moment Mourinho and some of his players do not seem to be enjoying their time together. Which makes one wonder how things will turn out.
