There was a great irony to Jose Mourinho marching into the Manchester City dressing room after full time on Sunday to demand the victorious victors show some respect in their celebrations. After all, his Manchester United side had suffered for showing their rivals too much respect on the pitch. At times that respect even verged on fear, with United unable to keep the ball for any great length of time.
Even more ironic, Mourinho has based his entire career on a lack of respect. He cares not for the status quo, the way things are conventionally done. This is the man who sprinted down the Old Trafford touchline before knee-sliding at the corner flag in celebration of Porto’s famous win in 2003. The man who darted across the Camp Nou pitch, finger wagging at the Barcelona director’s box in 2010.
Mourinho is a hypocrite. It’s understandable that he was hurting after Sunday’s derby defeat which all but ended his side’s hopes of catching Manchester City, and most notably for Mourinho his great adversary Pep Guardiola, at the top of the Premier League table. But if the Portuguese really based his argument on a point of respect, it’s little wonder City’s players didn’t laugh in his face. Maybe they did.
It was Arsene Wenger who Mourinho once labelled as a “specialist in failure.” In fact, the Arsenal boss has bore the brunt of the Portuguese’s ire for over a decade. Mourinho revels in the failure of the Frenchman, but with every passing season the Portuguese turns into the man he has mocked and derided for years. If Wenger is a hypocrite, as Mourinho once called him, then the Man Utd boss is too.
What’s more, there are parallels to be drawn between the two men in the way they have lost their touch as coaches. Wenger is credited with modernising the English game upon his arrival at Arsenal in the late 1990s. He brought a certain continental quality that completely changed the Premier League, sparking the revolution that produced what we know the top flight to be today.
However, Wenger is now a relic of a bygone age. The Premier League has moved on without him, with his ways and methods now outdated. Mourinho was one of the managers who eclipsed him at the top of the English game, but he too appears to be behind the curve. That was exposed by Guardiola and his City team on Sunday.
Once renowned for his shrewdness, for the way he planned every little meticulous detail down to the remarks he would make to the media, now Mourinho’s approach seems scattergun. Is there really any grand plan behind what he says in press conferences? His tactics are the big game no longer deliver such reliable results. There’s a curious paradox to much of what he now does.
Of course, it’s possible that Guardiola is simply the one force Mourinho cannot overcome in the same way Mourinho was, and still is, for Wenger. The former Barcelona and Bayern Munich is setting a precedent that the Manchester United boss can’t match and that must grate on a manager whose entire reputation, at least in England, is based on being the best. At present, he is second best.
Whatever the real reason behind his clear discomfort, Mourinho needs to recalibrate. He is still doing a good job at Man Utd, with the Old Trafford clearly the second best side in the Premier League this season. But he must find a way to reverse his own personal decline if he is to scale the highest heights again. Otherwise he will become the antithesis of his former self.
