Theatre of Dreams or an Arena of Nightmares?

The PROBLEM that Jose Mourinho is facing at Manchester United is he does not have the players required to execute his preferred 4-2-3-1 formation — a strategy that more and more football managers are ditching due to its demand for discipline.

- Nevin Thomas

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When Manchester United appointed JoseMourinho as its new manager in the summer, it did not come as a surprise for football fans across the world. After all, the inevitable had happened. The manager, who has always been open about his love for the Red Devils and who supposedly cried after Sir Alex Ferguson overlooked him for the job in 2013, had finally arrived at the ‘Theatre of Dreams’. The script was perfect too — the self-proclaimed ‘Special One’ at a club in desperate need of success after seasons of under-performances.

YET, THE ALLIANCE BETWEEN the two, which saw the bookmakers marking Manchester United as favourite to win the English Premier League title at the start of the season, has not achieved the kind of results it had hoped to. In his first 16 games as United’s manager, Mourinho’s record is worse than that of his predecessors, Louis van Gaal and David Moyes.

Mourinho’s biggest problem, perhaps, lies in his own rigidity — an unwillingness to adapt to circumstances, largely due to his staunch belief in self. His stints across clubs (Chelsea, Inter Milan and Real Madrid) suggest that the Portuguese, while being a master of moulding well-oiled teams to execute his plan, can sometimes be caught off-guard when his ‘Plan A’ falters.

Take Chelsea’s Champions League battles with Paris Saint Germain in the past seasons for example. A team that completely dominated the EPL playing a 4-23-1 (Cesc Fabregas and Nemanja Matic forming the midfield pivot) failed to stop a 10-man PSG in 2015. Mourinho failed to adopt an attacking approach after PSG went a man down in the early minutes and instead relied on his first choice plan — to sit back and counter. This allowed the men from Paris to dominate possession and go through on ‘away goals’.