Jose Mourinho Risks Derailing His Improving Side with His Combative Outbursts

There was a frost in the air on Merseyside, but even the warmest spring sunshine couldn’t have pierced the icy fog collecting around Jose Mourinho. As Marouane Fellaini felled Idrissa Gueye with all the finesse that fans have come to expect from the unwieldy Belgian, and Leighton Baines lashed home Everton’s 89th-minute equaliser from the spot. Down on the away bench, the Manchester United manager’s face was fixed with a stony glare. It was a look to freeze mercury.

This was a game United had had comfortably in their hands but which they handed back to a grateful Everton in the final minutes. That’s seven points now dropped in the final 10 minutes of Premier League games this season for United, and there comes a point where even the footballing arch-pragmatist Mourinho must recognise he is failing in that eternal axiom of football management; it is his job not just to manage his team, but to also manage the game.

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On Sunday, when United’s lead stood at a delicate 1-0 and the situation cried out for calm, he introduced a volatile element into proceedings, under the misapprehension that it would shore up a defence that was already doing a good job of holding firm.

His justification for replacing the excellent Henrikh Mkhitaryan with Fellaini—that placing a player standing at almost two metres tall in front of the back four would add an extra line of protection against an Everton side who were increasingly direct in their play—was sound. That's even if his tetchy handling of the post-match press conference added fuel to the idea the Portuguese is a long way from having a firm grip on the deteriorating situation at Old Trafford.

Days before Everton, Mourinho had spoken about the "United DNA," the philosophy he is trying to bring to bear on his team during these fledgling early weeks of his tenure. "We play now in between the opponents' lines," he declared. "We look forward; our defensive line is very high. Our central defenders don't follow the man; they defend zonal. I only care about the way we play ... keep the faith in the way we are playing and try to have better results, and let's see where that ends."

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It makes for a worthwhile comparison when held up against what was said back in July in an interview with MUTV (h/t the Express), shortly after his unveiling. That day the talk was all about moving away from the prosaic methods employed by his predecessor Louis Van Gaal, espousing instead a game that moved vertically not horizontally, with directness and intensity. It was about not keeping possession just for the sake of statistics, and playing with quick transitions. Five months almost to the day since speaking those words, Mourinho’s United do look a different proposition to that stodgy ensemble left behind by Van Gaal.

Speaking to the BBC after the game on Sunday, Everton manager Ronald Koeman observed how United had dominated the ball while failing to create. In all, United enjoyed 55 percent of the ball at Goodison Park while managing just two efforts on target, three if Ander Herrera’s second-half slice, which struck the post, is counted. This wasn’t, though, the same attritional brand of keep-ball that turned United into that sideways-moving machine that weaved such predictable patterns under Van Gaal and saw them fail to register a first-half goal at Old Trafford between September and February.

There is intensity to the way this team moves the ball, but it comes in short, sharp bursts. United’s ball movement at Goodison was exceptional at times, but outside of these pockets of speed and fizz, their tempo flatlined, buying Everton that necessary oxygen they needed to recover and re-group. It is, though, finally, not beyond the realm of plausibility to suggest United are looking a more dangerous attacking unit than at any time since the abdication of Sir Alex Ferguson three-and-a-half years ago.

And yet, while the team are slowly beginning to make changes on the pitch toward that classically aggressive, classically United way of attacking, their manager’s patience is growing conspicuously thin.

That symbiosis between Mourinho and the media, that which once made him the darling of the backpages, has curdled, leaving him snapping and snarling at a press that has fallen far from his tractor beam of charm. That lack of chemistry is a measure of how lacking in control he now looks at United.

The manager addressed the media in the Goodison Park press room from behind a festive arrangement of tinsel and twinkling lights. As he railed stony-faced against the temerity of those reporters who questioned the expediency of his bringing on a player to shore up the game but who seconds later cost his side the match, he appeared all the more fatuous peering out from behind the glitter. How deep do these ill-tempered public protestations burrow into the psyche of his players? Just ask the Chelsea dressing room; it was just shy of a year ago that he lost the minds of key players as results stubbornly refused to turn.

At United, Mourinho’s frustrations are not hard to disinter. Speaking on the BBC, Jermaine Jenas observed that "it just isn’t Mourinho" to keep throwing away points late in the day, but the question must surely now be asked: How many more times does it need to happen until it is? The mechanics of game management, that sometimes dark art of snuffing out opposition that at times in his career would come into effect as soon as his side had scored the first goal, now seems forgotten to him. Who, in truth, wouldn’t be deeply touched by such a drastic depreciation of their powers?

Still, this is the same manager whose last Premier League title was, as he has been keen to remind, only 18 months ago, and if a sustained period of converting draws into victories can be achieved, it’s easy to see how those jitters that dog his side during the closing stages of games could be replaced by the kind of assurance that underscored Ferguson’s reign. But as United slowly begin to knit together on the pitch, the biggest threat to Mourinho is his own propensity towards self-annihilation.

His team have been dominant too often this season without finishing sides off, most notably at Old Trafford against Burnley and Stoke City in October, but the picture the manager has tried so hard to paint of a team playing their opponents off the pitch feels desperate from the Portuguese.

Against Everton, as against Arsenal last month, his team set the rhythm and controlled the ball without ever putting sustained pressure on their opponents. Indeed the current hallmarks of this United side are of a team whose creative lynchpins are just beginning to learn how to get the best out of each other, without yet finding a consistent end product.

If Mourinho is looking for a lifeline, some redeeming argument with which he can face the press, then surely this is it, rather than hackneyed attempts to play up his side as the "unluckiest team in the league." There is something stirring in this United side, but the air around the manager’s dugout remains thick with frost.