PL Preview: Call off the Hounds; It's Far Too Soon to Write off Mourinho

In a week news broke of the highest-profile divorce since Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton called time on the "marriage of the century" back in 1974, Jose Mourinho must feel his own honeymoon period at Manchester United is similarly over.

While there is no chance of a quick annulment at Old Trafford, the odds have lengthened of late on a long and prosperous marriage. After three defeats in a week, and a leaked story of dressing-room unrest, editors across the globe will have started to sound out potential obituary writers.

Mourinho may be just 118 days into his tenure, but in a sport that deals in dog years, it's best to be well prepared. His methods are being written off as anachronistic after an indifferent, not disastrous, first 450 minutes of the Premier League season. You couldn't fly one-way from London to New York in the game time he has overseen domestically. Still, if it bleeds it leads. 

It's always difficult not to divorce football from real life. A manager or a player can never just have an off day, like we might at the office because we're stressed, or tired, or had an argument with a partner, or one of the kids has kept us up all night. There always has to be a black-and-white reason for performance, which can be scrutinised and analysed by knocking up a heat map.

Maybe Mourinho isn't quite at his best because he's still coming to terms with the enormity of the job, as David Moyes and Louis van Gaal are said to have struggled with when they occupied the most important office in a huge corporation. Maybe he's still getting used to life in a new city, living as he is in the Lowry Hotel while his family continues to reside in London.

It's almost as if footballers and managers are real people and don't always perform at their absolute peak in the first few weeks of a new job—a bit like the rest of us, then.

A win at Northampton Town on Wednesday in the Capital One Cup has already been forgotten as thoughts turn to Saturday's game against Leicester City at Old Trafford. Should the champions inflict on United a third league defeat on the spin, knives will replace pens as the implement of choice for those charged with reporting a tempestuous sea change, perceived or otherwise, inside the club.

If nothing else Mourinho can take a perverse pleasure in returning Manchester United to their perch as public enemy No. 1.

To read the press since the Watford game without the context of a league table, it would be impossible to conclude anything other than the club is engulfed in a full-blown catastrophe. James Ducker's piece in the Telegraph at the start of the week has given plentiful ammunition to a cartel of critics who see Mourinho as yesterday's man clinging onto the coattails of a new breed of manager.

It began:

"

Manchester United's players fear that Jose Mourinho's fierce private and public criticism is damaging confidence and already having a destabilising effect on their season.

The squad have been left shocked not only by Mourinho's public censure of individual players, including Luke Shaw, Henrikh Mkhitaryan and Jesse Lingard, but the personal nature of criticism behind closed doors as the United manager faces an early crisis in his reign.

"

Ducker quotes a source as revealing: "His delivery of criticism is nasty. It is far more personal than Fergie ever was."

Presumably Sir Alex Ferguson's infamous hairdryer blew out whale music and yogic chanting. Given the sharpness of Ferguson's tongue could cut through a concrete breeze block, it's hard to imagine United's senior ranks—the only players to have served under both managers—would deem Mourinho any more overbearing.

Seemingly when Ferguson fell out with retiring characters over the years like David Beckham, Jaap Stam, Roy Keane, Gordon Strachan, Paul Ince, Paul McGrath, Norman Whiteside, Carlos Tevez, Ruud van Nistelrooy et al., it never once got personal, which is nice.

The sanctuary of the dressing room, it appears, remains sacrament, with any criticism uttered outside of its four walls one of the game's last remaining taboos. Say what you want in it, but woe betide anyone who talks with candour to an interloper not in possession of a peg.

Gary Neville was quick to lambast a leak in United's camp, while at the same time giving Ducker's piece due credence by stating it was clearly based on information passed on to the writer. The assumption Manchester United have a mole has turned Twitter this past week into a playground for amateur George Smileys, with Wayne Rooney inevitably the man accused most often of having a loose tongue.

Given he'd probably top a straw poll asking who was responsible for Brexit, the Crimean War, Opal Fruits changing to Starburst, polio, the murder of Twin Peaks' Laura Palmer, the Bake Off’s defection to Channel 4, climate change, queue jumpers, grassing up Billy to the Bishop in Coronation Street, slow traffic on a hot day and the global financial crisis, it was no surprise when United's captain was held accountable by social media's kangaroo court.

While it's fun to imagine Rooney stopping at a service station on the M62 to meet Ducker wearing Groucho Marx-style fake glasses, nose and moustache, quite why he'd feel compelled to lament the last remaining human on earth, other than Phil Neville, who would start him on present form is somewhat mystifying.

Herein lies the paradox at the heart of the matter. Many of those who have taken mortal affront at Mourinho's treatment of Luke Shaw would be the first to purchase a tub of popcorn and push their way to the front were he ever to subject Rooney to a public flogging.

Much has been made of Mourinho's public criticism of the left-back after the 3-1 defeat at Watford, with the 21-year-old having also felt the wrath of Van Gaal's tongue in a tough first season at the club in which he struggled to bring with him his best form from Southampton.

Still easing his way back from a 10-month spell out with a broken leg, it is said senior members of United's squad fear Shaw could have his confidence eroded by Mourinho's public lament of his part in Watford's second goal.

"Our left-back is 25 metres away instead of five," Mourinho said in his post-match press conference. "But give him 25 metres and you have to press. But no, we wait. It is a tactical but also mental attitude."

It's not exactly Malcolm Tucker. As denunciations go, it's about as gentle as it gets. Other than sit Shaw on his knee like a kindly grandfather and go through what he should have done before giving him a Werther's Original to ensure no hard feelings, it's hard to see how Mourinho could have been milder.

The reality is no one cares about how managers treat their players when the team is winning. Faux outrage at how Mourinho is in danger of leaving Shaw a quivering wreck is no more than a smokescreen for sticking the boot in when United are in a poor run of form, as it makes good copy.

Pep Guardiola has binned off two of Manchester City's greatest-ever servants in the most successful period in the club's history and everyone is over it already, primarily because he's won his first eight matches. Had City made United's start, newspapers would have to print additional pages to accommodate daily opinion pieces on Joe Hart and Yaya Toure.

Ronald Koeman has been critical of one of his star players this season in effectively telling Ross Barkley to grow up when he was moping after being left out of Sam Alladyce's first England squad. Again, no one cares because Everton have made their best start to a campaign in years.

After three seasons of inertia interspersed with abjectness, it hardly seems preposterous Mourinho is keen to jolt his new charges out of a place of unmerited complacency. Complaints about a manager are nothing new, and it's worth remembering that a dressing room where everyone is happy has its problems, too. Just as actors are not necessarily the best judges of directors, the same can be said of footballers' tastes in managers.

What Mourinho said is nowhere near as interesting as why he has chosen to shift his approach. Candidness about individual performances, in relative terms, is at odds with a previous principle of being at pains to keep his players out of the firing line at any cost. There are those who cite his time in Madrid, when he lost the dressing-room support of Real royalty Iker Casillas and Sergio Ramos, as being the period when he stopped seeing players as brothers in arms and honed back his "one for all, and all for all" musketeer rhetoric.

Talk of a light having gone out during the Madrid years and only ever having flickered intermittently since may prove to have prescience, but the current climate of deeming Mourinho a shepherd who has lost his flock, if not even his vocation, seems hopelessly premature. And that's coming from someone who purred United had the look of champions after the Southampton game, prone as I am to falling for more red herrings over the course of a season than are standard in a Nordic Noir box set.

Having refused to attend the post-match press conference at Northampton on the grounds he was not "contractually bound" to speak to the media, per The Independent's Ian Herbert, Mourinho made clear he has felt slighted by subsequent reports ruminating on dressing-room discord. Clearly he doesn't subscribe to the Andy Warhol mantra: "Don't pay attention to what people write about you. Just measure it in inches."

As Mourinho will well know, a no-show opens the door to interpretation. If you don't give a journalist enough words to fill a blank page, they tend to use their own. Rarely are they gushing having been given the runaround on a deadline.

On Thursday, Herbert wrote: "The retreat in victimhood contributes to a sense that his failure at Chelsea last season has changed him and removed some of the old certainties. That might also explain the subdued manner in the technical area in Northampton."

I'd argue the fact he was in a technical area in Northampton might explain the subdued manner, but that's just me.

Had Mourinho yawned out a few mealy-mouthed platitudes, speculation into his inner-workings would probably have been avoided. However, it may appear from the outside peering in that the fact he didn't will have been a considered choice rather than an act of petulance. If relations with his players have been "you" and "I" so far, it would not be a surprise were he to batten down the hatches and it become a case of "us" and "them" with regards the media.

It was with no little rancor he addressed the club's in-house television station MUTV (via the Guardian's Sachin Nakrani), when he spoke of "football's Einsteins" trying to undermine both his own and Manchester United's achievements. In a poor run amid growing criticism, pulling himself closer to the club seems a typically smart move.

"I know that some football Einsteins—football is full of Einsteins—I know that they tried to delete 16 years of my career," he told MUTV. "They tried to delete an unbelievable history of Man United football club and to focus on a bad week with three bad results. But that's the new football—it's full of Einsteins."

The problem with introducing Albert Einstein into the conversation is you run the risk of the physicist's definition of insanity (doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results) coming up, while at the same time continuing to select Rooney. Notwithstanding this potential fly in the ointment, Mourinho has a point.

Given he inherited a Manchester United side as pallid and flaccid as the fat on a pork chop taken off the heat too soon, is it any wonder teething problems are manifold? In the wake of Ferguson's retirement, they have less been rudderless than had a great big bloody hole in the boat. All the money in the world isn't much help when you are lost at sea.

Square pegs are still being wedged into round holes; Michael Carrick, Morgan Schneiderlin and Ander Herrera are being as underused as much as Rooney and Marouane Fellaini are overused; Paul Pogba still needs a straight partner like Roger Murtaugh to his maverick Martin Riggs (so he can become a lethal weapon, as opposed to just a weapon); the tempo needs to be quickened dramatically; infantile moaning about his predecessor we could all do without; a decision on whether to play with a 4-2-3-1 or 4-3-3 would be nice; as would a run for Marcus Rashford through the middle.

Mourinho can have no excuses if these issues, among others, are not addressed over the course of the season, but to talk of a crisis already is to order dentures for a one-year-old because they haven't a full set of teeth.

A start to the season that encompassed a Community Shield victory, followed by three wins from as many Premier League matches, hinted the club had stumbled upon a short-term fix. Damning defeats to Manchester City, Feyenoord and Watford suggest otherwise.

Underwhelming, perhaps, but certainly not cataclysmic. Arsenal, Chelsea and Liverpool are all just a point better off heading into the weekend, with only Everton and Manchester City more than a win away.

There is no doubt Guardiola's immaculate introduction to English football has intensified the glare on Mourinho, with City's dominance of the Manchester derby (absolute for 40 minutes) bringing into stark light the extent of the job Mourinho has to do.

Mourinho has yet to cajole that extra level of performance from a player in the manner Guardiola has across the cobbles with Raheem Sterling, or even Kevin De Bruyne, but it's worth reiterating the City squad bequeathed to the Spaniard was considerably more balanced than United's.

The derby defeat was also the first time as United manager he singled out individual players for criticism. Henrikh Mkhitaryan and Jesse Lingard will feel being substituted at half-time should have said enough about their respective performances. Both will get over it.

For all that, it was little more than a year ago Mourinho was crowned Manager of the Year, having won the Premier League and League Cup double with Chelsea. Last season aged him, no doubt, and he's grumpier than ever. To suggest he's a spent force though is nonsense. Even if the well of ambition ever dries up a little, which it won't, Mourinho will run fine on anger until the day he retires.

This can only be a good thing given a cursory flick through the morning papers will keep the fire burning for Saturday's clash with Leicester City.