PL Hangover: Pogba, Zlatan and Mourinho Give Man United the Swagger of Champions

In his seminal profile of Frank Sinatra for Esquire magazine in 1966, American writer and journalist Gay Talese wrote of his subject, "Frank Sinatra had a cold. Sinatra with a cold is Picasso without paint, Ferrari without fuel—only worse."

Had he wished to make his point with a sledgehammer, he might have added: "Manchester United without swagger." When Sir Alex Ferguson retired his seat in the dugout for one in the Old Trafford gods, it was as though in clearing out his office he mistakenly packed the club's DNA in with his own belongings. He has yet to return it.

Indeed, Manchester United with a cold seems an apt summation of the post-Ferguson years to date.

In three competitive matches, Jose Mourinho has done as much as David Moyes and Louis van Gaal managed in three seasons between them to remind the world Ferguson was the gatekeeper to a great institution, as opposed to being the institution itself.

Just 180 minutes into a new Premier League season is hardly the time to make great proclamations. Yet to be cautious at a juncture when Crystal Palace can sign a misfiring striker for £27 million (the fee for Christian Benteke could rise to £32 million with add-ons) with not even a cursory eyebrow raised, would seem at odds with an all-pervading sense of largesse that has either infused or infected English football's top flight, depending on your respective sensibilities.

Throwing caution to the wind, then—or, as it may turn out, pissing directly into it with 36 of 38 matches still to play—Manchester United have the look of champions. It appears to have jelled far more quickly than anyone could have envisaged for Mourinho and United. 

For the first time since Ferguson retired, they appear to be driving forward cohesively, as opposed to nervously glancing at the wing mirror every other second to check what has followed in their wake. 

In terms of leaving legacies at football clubs, characters like Mourinho, Zlatan Ibrahimovic and Paul Pogba look to make history as opposed to being a slave to it. Such impenetrable self-belief may be seen as unpalatable to those who like to see their stars dished up with a side portion of humility, but for the first time in a long while, the club has its swagger back.

The aforementioned trio will all feel Manchester United are just as lucky to have them as they are lucky to be there. Confidence only veers into hubris when it can't be backed up with results. 

That in itself is a radical departure from recent years, where a raft of big-money signings including Radamel Falcao, Angel Di Maria, Bastian Schweinsteiger, Marcos Rojo, Morgan Schneiderlin and Memphis Depay have all seemingly been overwhelmed, and underwhelmed as a consequence. The ghost of Garry Birtles is unlikely to haunt either of Ibrahimovic or Pogba.

Self-belief in a dressing room is often contagious. Marouane Fellaini seems to be a pet project for Mourinho. In the footballing equivalent of Pedro's being appointed class president in Napoleon Dynamite, the Portuguese seems halfway there to convincing the Old Trafford faithful the maligned Belgian wasn't bought by Moyes to win a bet.

Antonio Valencia is another rejuvenated. Over the past couple of seasons, the inevitability of the Ecuadorian cutting back, as opposed to driving for the byline he's clearly capable of reaching, has been one of the more frustrating sights in the Premier League. Mourinho clearly agrees.

Pound-for-pound, Luke Shaw should prove to be the league's best left-back with a dozen more games under his belt. With only Anthony Martial offering an explosive outlet in terms of pace, it's been a feature of United's play to have both full-backs bomb on and press high up the pitch despite the fact they have generally defended quite deep.

On the topic of pace, for all Juan Mata's neat touches and nice continuity play, it seems a matter of when not if Henrikh Mkhitaryan will replace him on the right.

It is interesting to note a lot of the praise for Friday night's 2-0 victory over Southampton was caveated by the fact it was an "easy win."

That's kind of the point.

Making winning football matches look easy is a hallmark of champions. If every "big" club had got the job done in the "easy" matches last season, Mourinho's abject Chelsea included, Leicester City would almost certainly not have won the Premier League title.

While victories over Bournemouth and Southampton would not in normal circumstances be cause to bring out the bunting, it is the manner in which United have seamlessly negotiated potentially tricky games that has caught the eye.

Mourinho teams are always given respect, yet there is a sense he is being damned with faint praise when his ability to coax routine victories from his players is cited as being one of his key qualities. Other activities often described as routine: dentist appointments, filing tax returns, going to work, cutting the grass, renewing insurance polices, the big shop, vacuuming, small talk.

Pep Guardiola teams rarely win routinely.

One suspects Mourinho would wholeheartedly be in agreement with the W. H. Auden line: "Routine, in an intelligent man, is a sign of great ambition."

There was no little ambition demonstrated by United in the Premier League's inaugural Friday night game of the season.

Mourinho, in a typically cocksure assumption of his place already in the club's hierarchy, had told United's supporters both over the summer and in his programme notes they needed to find their voice again before signing off with a flourish: "It is good to be home."

Given when he tasked Chelsea supporters to do likewise in his second spell at Stamford Bridge his status went from walking on water to walking on a tightrope, it seemed an unnecessarily risky stance to take. A giant banner unfurled in the home end with Mourinho's face on one side and "This is the One" on the other indicates he's probably pitched his battle cry at just the right level.

Herein lies Mourinho's fascinating capacity to draw disparate elements of a football club together and make them whole again (at least for a couple of seasons). United supporters feel disenfranchised from what they have seen over the past few years, so he makes them part of the solution. It's one of football's proverbial chicken-and-egg questions: Should crowds rouse the players or players rouse the crowd?

Mourinho has asked to meet somewhere in the middle. When you have a pair of aces up your sleeve in the form of home debuts for Pogba and Ibrahimovic, even the most curmudgeon of United supporters would struggle to sit on their hands.

In the Van Gaal years, the most exciting thing to look at during home games was the ingredients list on the back of a half-time packet of crisps. Looking forward to watching United again seems like a novelty.

Pogba's first contribution will have elicited 89 million different reasons from pub bores as to why he isn't worth the money Manchester United paid to make him the world's most expensive player. A poor touch in the centre of the field gifted Southampton a dangerous counter-attack situation, only curtailed by Valencia's foul.

Ryan Giggs perhaps best summed up Pogba's performance in the Sky Sports studio. There will be no bigger compliment paid to Pogba this season than when somebody says they are not thinking about the £89 million when they watch him play.

To fail to admire Pogba in full flow is to look at a masterwork in an art gallery and say you can't appreciate it because of its value. It's possible to enjoy an Edward Hopper without worrying how you are going to finance it.

To reduce everything to a price tag is precisely why football dialogue so often veers into debates into who is better value, as opposed to just who's better. It used to be such a simple game, when you didn't take a calculator and spreadsheet to the pub. 

Disregarding the disappointment that the ball didn't let off a blinding vortex of flames whenever he took possession, like at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark when the Nazis open it up, it was hard to pick fault with a debut that will no doubt have unnerved Claudio Ranieri, Arsene Wenger, Mauricio Pochettino, Guardiola, Jurgen Klopp and Antonio Conte.

In the season of the Galactico manager, United have secured one for the dugout and two for the pitch. They are greedy again after three years of nibbling on the morsels of ambition shown by Moyes and Van Gaal.  

Pogba's previous spell in Manchester after moving to England from Le Havre consisted of seven substitute appearances, with the player having never started a game for United. If he left Old Trafford a precociously talented kid, he has returned with pretty much everything in his locker to become the world's best midfielder.

Against a typically neat and well-drilled Southampton side, albeit one depleted after another summer of systematic selling, Pogba was a puppy in an Andrex factory. Opta administered protective gloves to anyone wanting to look at his heat map.

Whether going short or long, he showed invention in his range of passing while topping the charts in terms of most shots, key passes and interceptions.

In Saturday's edition of the Times, his stamina was rated a miss. In stoppage time he blazed wide having run 85 yards to conclude a move he had started on the edge of his own box. As someone who gets out of breath restocking the fridge with beer, I'd personally have let him off on the stamina front.

An effortless mover, he glided over the field with an almost quixotic mix of power and poise. Time and time again he dropped a shoulder and drove forward from the centre of the pitch, the hardest place to do so. He's like a boxer with ballet shoes.

After the game, Mourinho declared himself satisfied with a "good enough" team performance while conceding he is loath to tether Pogba to any role that may stifle his talent.

"We have to build a certain organisation around him [Pogba], but he has to play free. For a player to play with the freedom, we have to build certain organisations around him," Mourinho said post-match, per the Manchester Evening News' Samuel Luckhurst. "So the moment we lose the ball we have to be protected, the moment he starts to go forward we need to bring other players to the first phase, but he has to play with freedom."

It's a measure of the esteem he holds the Frenchman, given Eden Hazard could only have dreamed of such a remit at Chelsea. Mourinho wouldn't have left Hazard outside a bookies without first having tied him to a lamp post. 

As Jonathan Northcroft noted in the Sunday Times, Mourinho looks to be trying to ape the Manchester United sides of the early '90s, where athleticism was matched by flair. Ferguson's first title-winning sides were always able to "outplay but also outmuscle the opposition."

New signings Pogba, Ibrahimovic and Eric Bailly can all play, but when higher-profile matches prove to be tooth-and-nail affairs, it's likely to be the opposition left missing a fair few of the former.

Concerns about Ibrahimovic's age—he turns 35 next month—appear ill-founded. It's said back in Sweden babies ask Zlatan how he stays looking so young. A brace on Friday night was complemented with a now-obligatory statistic: His penalty was his 49th goal in his past 39 league games.

Ibrahimovic's first to open the scoring in the first half was a vision. When Wayne Rooney peeled away wide right and shaped his body perfectly to put in a delivery, he will have seen his strike partner make only the subtlest of movements. At 6'4", it was as though Ibrahimovic was challenging his marker Jose Fonte to an aerial duel. One-on-one, a penalty-box street fight.

He hung and hung and hung before meeting the ball with his forehead like John Charles in his heyday, leaving Fraser Forster grasping thin air and Fonte simply gasping for it.

On occasion, Ibrahimovic and Rooney both occupied the same space a little too deep, as they did at Bournemouth. But with United's captain seemingly willing to be deferential for the good of the team, Mourinho may yet make work a partnership many have voiced reservations about.

In the post-match interviews, man-of-the-match Ibrahimovic and pal Pogba filled the screen with their presence. Physically both are thoroughbreds, but more than that, they exude the relaxed air of men very much aware of their respective standings in the profession.

The exaggerated version of himself Ibrahimovic presents to the world is so tongue-in-cheek he's shorter odds to win a Bafta than finish the season as top goalscorer. Pogba knows exactly who he is and makes no apologies for it.

Both will give the club back a sense of its lost identity following a troubled few years of navel-gazing.

The paradox in English football is we constantly lament a lack of characters and then when they arrive we can't help ourselves from shoehorning them into a box marked "eccentric" or "arrogant." Long may the pair continue to be both, if that's what they are.

A win at Hull City on Saturday would mark the best United start to a season in five years. After that, it's the Manchester derby.

It will take more than a handful of half-decent performances to convince us Manchester United are finally cleared of a cold that has afflicted them for the past three seasons. Yet in terms of getting clubs back to ruddy health after a period of ailment, Mourinho is as close as you will ever get to an aggressive course of antibiotics.