Why It’s OK For Man Utd Fans To Change Their Minds About Jose Mourinho
Scott Patterson |
May 30, 2016 |
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Football News 24/7
Jose Mourinho’s first game with Chelsea in England was against Manchester United at Stamford Bridge. With Roman Abramovich’s money and the current Champions League-winning manager, the fear for United fans was that the rule of west London would be indefinite.
United lost that game 1-0, putting out a starting XI which included the likes of Liam Miller, Eric Djemba-Djemba, Alan Smith and Quinton Fortune, among others. That season Chelsea also knocked United out of the League Cup, before receiving a guard of honour ahead of kick-off at Old Trafford for winning the league, and then beat United 3-1. Two days later, the Glazers bought United. It was a dreadful time for the club and the supporters, and Mourinho’s Chelsea became synonymous with it.
The following season, Chelsea won the league again, this time thanks to a 3-0 victory over United at Stamford Bridge. With United tipped to plunge in to decline, following in the footsteps of their hated rivals Liverpool, Chelsea were on the rise, and it was painful. With no other teams able to challenge them, it felt like Mourinho would have another 10 titles before he left the country.
In his third season, though, against all odds, United won the title convincingly. They sold Ruud van Nistelrooy and didn’t replace him, only adding Michael Carrick to the squad that had previously finished second, miles behind Chelsea. In contrast, Mourinho added Ashley Cole, Michael Ballack and Andrey Shevchenko to their title-winning side. There were no excuses for Mourinho failing to win the title three years on the trot, but this was just the beginning of his pattern of short-term success.
It would be disingenuous to claim that the bad feeling between United fans and Mourinho came solely from the fact he had turned Chelsea into the best team for those two seasons. Of course that played a part, and how much of a part obviously varies from person to person, but it was about so much more than that. Mourinho is not a likeable person and he often behaves in an unacceptable way. Presumably people felt the same way about Sir Alex Ferguson, and the success he achieved only heightened the negative feelings and allowed for his faults to be emphasised.
During the 2006-07 season, when Cristiano Ronaldo suggested that Mourinho didn’t know how to admit his own failings, the manager responded by having a dig at the 21-year-old for having a poor upbringing and being uneducated. This was one of the earlier indicators to show Mourinho has no boundaries, for a grown man to publicly attack a young lad for having a difficult upbringing.
There was also the time when Mourinho lied about seeing Frank Rijkaard entering referee Anders Frisk’s room at half-time in Chelsea’s defeat against Barcelona in the Champions League. Frisk received death threats from Chelsea fans and retired from the game as a result, only for Mourinho to later admit he saw no such thing.
When looking at all the embarrassing, cringeworthy, and unacceptable behaviour that has followed, from trying to gauge out Tito Vilanova’s eye on the touchline in Spain, to forcing Eva Carneiro out of a job for no reason, even the most biased United fan would struggle to claim Mourinho doesn’t have huge flaws to his personality.
Regardless, Chelsea, Manchester City, Liverpool and Arsenal fans, and others, have taken to social media over the past few days and are on the rampage. Who knows how many hours they’ve collectively spent searching through the timelines of United fans, trying to find incriminating tweets where they’ve previously said something negative about Mourinho, but it’s not an amount of time that anyone could be proud of.
The conclusion of their hard work is that United fans have changed their minds on the manager. It may be hard to believe, but United fans used to think one way a few years ago, and now they think something else. It’s quite a remarkable find really, given that, judging by the hysterical reaction, they are the first group of human beings to ever change their opinion.
When United fans really hated Mourinho, their team had just been blunged close to £1 billion in debt, while Abramovich was buying players for Chelsea like it was going out of fashion. United fans had enjoyed the luxury of having the same manager for close to three decades, one who valued youth and played attacking football. Of course United fans didn’t want Mourinho back then, a manager who only ever spent a few years at a club, never gave youth a chance, and whose football was far more pragmatic.
Given a choice between Ferguson and Mourinho, United fans would pick Ferguson every time, but that’s not their choice today. Things change.
Having endured one season of David Moyes and two seasons of Louis van Gaal the option of Mourinho is obviously an upgrade. Being pleased that Mourinho is the manager, and the two previous managers aren’t, doesn’t mean that United fans are en masse forgetting all his misdemeanours. It’s still not on that he lied about that ref, or tried to belittle Ronaldo for not having a wealthy upbringing, or stuck his thumb in someone’s eye socket, or treated Carneiro in an appalling way, or was guilty of an almost endless list of other embarrassing actions.
United fans aren’t now pretending that Mourinho is the perfect solution, or talking about him as if he’s a saint, but it surely doesn’t need much explaining to understand why they would be pleased the former Chelsea man is their manager, and Van Gaal isn’t.
Does that mean United fans will now focus on Mourinho’s positives, rather than the negatives? Of course. They will talk about the treble he won at Inter, or the 121 goals his Real Madrid side scored when they won the league in 2012—an average of over three goals a game—because that’s the natural reaction for any set of fans when a new manager is signed or a new player is brought in.
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A month before Manuel Pellegrini became City’s manager, their fans were at Wembley singing “you can stick your Pellegrini up you’re a**e” as they watched their team lose to Wigan in the FA Cup final. A year later they were celebrating the title he had guided them to. Two years after that a three-quarters empty Etihad bid him farewell, keen to see the back of him. Fans change their mind, depending on the situation.
United fans know it’s likely Mourinho will make an idiot out of himself when again entering those infamous mind games with Arsene Wenger or Pep Guardiola, or will play tactics in big games that the fanbase would rather he didn’t, or get fined for something he says or does when United lose. He will probably only stay for a few years, then it will all implode and they’ll be back to square one. But at least the club will have someone in charge who is qualified for the job, unlike Moyes, and won’t send the fans to sleep at Old Trafford, unlike Van Gaal.
United supporters can also rely on the fact Mourinho isn’t an idiot. If everyone is saying he won’t play the academy players, after Van Gaal gave 15 youth players their debut in two years, and mockingly claim Marcus Rashford will be sent out on loan, you can presume Mourinho will do the opposite. If people claim that United will play boring and defensive football, you can guess that Mourinho will set up his team on the opening day of the season to go all-out attack.
In two seasons time, United may very well be just where they are now, or worse. Let’s not forget how badly Mourinho defended the title with Chelsea. Even Moyes did a better job, which says a lot. But chances are United supporters will enjoy watching their team play more than they have done over the past season, they will likely see them compete to win the title again, and for a lot of fans, that’s worth the downside of having Mourinho as the manager.
The objectives have changed, reality has sunk in and fans have warmed to their new manager. There isn’t another Ferguson, but Mourinho resembles the legendary manager much more than Moyes or Van Gaal do. United fans have been brought down to earth over the past three years, so their reaction to Mourinho’s appointment is obvious and completely justified.
“I think I prefer to forget the last three years,” Mourinho said at his unveiling. United fans couldn’t agree more and they are now desperate to see what their manager can do to add to their history books in the seasons ahead.
