José Mourinho is not normally one for hanging about. The blistering starts to his first couple of Chelsea campaigns resulted in Sir Alex Ferguson restructuring his pre-season schedules in an attempt to keep up, but the new Manchester United manager fears he will not be quite so quick out of the blocks this time because his players have spent two years being drilled in sideways movement and slowness.
“We need time,” Mourinho said. “I cannot tell you that we are going to start the season at 100 miles per hour, I cannot say that. The previous manager had different ideas to mine. I am not saying they were wrong, but if you are a right-back or a left-back and every time you have the ball you think you have to pass to your central defender, it is going to take time to adapt to new solutions.”
Mourinho made sure to refer to Louis van Gaal as a top manager and said he was perfectly entitled to his methods, but explained that after two years they have become pretty much ingrained. “It might be easier for us to bring in 20 completely new players and start again from zero,” he said.
“I want my players to get the ball and look straight away for solutions in the space between opponents’ lines. In training, when they don’t do that, you can stop, explain, repeat and so on, but in a real game the ball comes to you and you have no time, your reaction has to be automatic.
“We are also trying to switch to zonal marking and that is also difficult if you have had two years of man-to-man. My central defenders have been chasing the opponent even when he goes 15 or 20 metres back down the pitch. I am not saying that system is wrong, I am simply saying it is not my way to do it. I keep telling the players we play zonal now, you don’t follow the man and that way we stay compact as a team, but I only have a short time to change ideas that have been put in over two years.
“Maybe I should say: ‘OK, let’s carry on playing the same way, because changing will take too long’, but I feel I have to change this and not be afraid. I make the decisions and the players are working really hard to go in my direction, but it will take a little time.”
Time is the one thing Mourinho might not be afforded in his new position. No one imagines he will be out before Christmas, as happened at Chelsea last season, but unlike David Moyes and Van Gaal, who were led to believe that rebuilding after the Ferguson era would be a long-term project, Mourinho’s track record and his spending to date suggests a quick turnaround is now envisaged.
“It is not new in my career,” he said. “Everywhere I have been I have had to cope with that situation. It doesn’t matter where I am, everyone expects big things, it’s nothing new and to be honest I am comfortable with it. I like to create expectation at clubs, I like the players to feel it. Sometimes in my career I have created unrealistic targets, because by doing that you can push the team to new and unexpected levels. Winning the Champions League with Porto or Inter, for instance.
“Both were unexpected and very risky objectives to aim for and maybe winning the championship in the first season at Manchester United is a little bit of the same. But I like that. People can analyse it as arrogance if they choose, that’s not a problem for me. I think we should be setting difficult targets for ourselves.”
Sunday afternoon’s Community Shield against Leicester should give an idea of how Mourinho will set up his United team, even if he ends up using it as a training exercise after what he feels has been inadequate pre-season preparation. “We have not played enough matches, and a week of no work in China was really bad for us,” he said. “Some of my players still need minutes on the pitch.”
Even so, the change from the Van Gaal era should be noticeable. “We want to be dominant, but not necessarily by trying to have a huge percentage of ball possession,” he said. “The important thing is to be dominant in the last third, so as to best use the quality of strikers like Wayne Rooney and Zlatan Ibrahimovic. I don’t think those two are suited to a counterattacking style, so we will have to think of something else.
“I don’t have a particular way of playing football that I take from club to club, because you find yourself with different players at each club. What a coach must do is read the situation each time and adapt a game to suit the qualities of his players.”
That is certainly what Claudio Ranieri did at Leicester last season. Asked to assess the magnitude of that achievement Mourinho briefly chewed at the wrong end of the stick – “ask him if he would change his career with mine, I wouldn’t change mine with his” – before relaxing sufficiently to smile at the strange nature of football in England.
“This is not just the only country where something like that could happen, it is the only place where people want a story like Leicester’s to happen,” he said. “I don’t think anyone thought before the season started that what Leicester would do was possible, maybe not even the guy who put on the bet and made all that money. Perhaps halfway through the season, when you could see how well Leicester were going and that the big clubs were not going, you could start feeling, hey, attention, this might be possible. But this time last year? Let us not be hypocrites, I don’t believe anyone thought that. It was an unbelievable achievement.”
