Jose Mourinho Must Get Back the Lion-Tamer's Edge or All Will Be Lost

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.

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In 2016, at Manchester United, and 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 lost both games. But in the abstract, which seems preferable: a manager who takes action or one who doesn’t? A manager who backs himself or one who waits and then condemns his players anyway?

The public criticism of Henrikh Mkhitaryan and Jesse Lingard after the derby was followed by criticism of Luke Shaw after the defeat at Watford. Given Shaw was carrying an injury (as Mkhitaryan had been), a number of newspapers, such as the Times, reported that players were “shocked” by Mourinho’s words. Perhaps he wanted to shock them, but it is an almighty gamble.

One of Sir Alex Ferguson’s heroes as a manager was Scot Symon, under whom he briefly played at Rangers. Symon was a stern disciplinarian, but he had a strict policy of never criticising his players in public, something Ferguson took into his own managerial career. The contrast with Mourinho could hardly be more marked.

Again, perhaps it’s not that significant. Different managers have different methods. But the criticism of others, offering them up as an excuse, chimed with a line in Diego Torres’ controversial biography of Mourinho, The Special One: The Dark Side of Jose Mourinho.

According to Torres, a United executive told Gestifute, Jorge Mendes’ agency that represents the Portuguese, that “The problem is when things do not go well for Mou, he does not follow the club’s line. He follows Jose’s line.”

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There was a time, earlier in Mourinho’s career, when he was compared to the great Hungarian coach Bela Guttmann, who won two European Cups with Benfica. Both were irascible and charismatic; both seemed to work best in short spells at a club before the abrasiveness of their personalities wore down players and directors.

Guttmann said a coach was like a lion-tamer: “He dominates the animals, in whose cage he performs his show, as long as he deals with them with self-confidence and without fear. But the moment he becomes unsure of his hypnotic energy, and the first hint of fear appears in his eyes, he is lost."

These are early days for Mourinho at Manchester United. Much of the pressure on him comes from how well Pep Guardiola is doing at City—and it doesn’t help that central to that is Kevin De Bruyne, a player whose departure form Chelsea he oversaw.

Everything is filtered through the prism of results. But the stats are beginning to stack up. He has lost 14 of his last 32 matches.

He is already blaming others, just as his final game as Chelsea manager ended with him insisting he had drilled his players in the four ways in which Leicester City score, only for them to ignore his advice and concede two in ways he had outlined. Even his tetchiness with injured players seems to echo his dispute with Eden Hazard during that match.

There is a long-standing theory that, for managers, a decade is about as long as they can hope for at the top. There are few exceptions, Ferguson being the most obvious. In the eight seasons from 2002-03 to 2009-10, Mourinho won seven league titles and two Champions Leagues; in the six seasons since he has won two league titles and no Champions Leagues.

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That’s what makes the delay in making a change against City so troubling. That’s what makes his public criticism of his players, which could be perceived as making excuses and protecting his own reputation, so worrying.

What happened on the touchline in the derby? Why did he fail to act? Could it be the hint of fear of which Guttmann spoke has entered his eye? Could it be the players can already sense his discomfort? And if they can, if the mystique has gone, and if he keeps criticising them, the sort of dressing-room unrest that characterised his final seasons at Real Madrid and Chelsea could recur.

Mourinho has to find his self-confidence again, but it’s hard to be ruthless or decisive with players who have already begun to doubt. It’s early, and there's still plenty of time to turn things around. To call this a crisis would be absurd, but there must be a mounting fear at United that Mourinho may not be the manager he used to be.