Luke Shaw attack splits Manchester United dressing room
Jose Mourinho says he wants to build a legacy at Manchester United. Nothing about his past suggests that he will. Mourinho leaves clubs spent and exhausted. He’s never lasted more than three years in one place.
One player tired of the tiresome manager is full-back Luke Shaw. Mourinho thought it right once again to criticise Shaw in public following United’s FA Cup win over Brighton on Saturday.
A fit Shaw was substituted at half-time. Mourinho says Shaw and fellow full-back Antonio Valencia failed to follow his tactical instructions. “I could have changed both of them at half-time.,” said Mourinho. “…I had to change one and I chose Luke because at least Antonio defensively was capable of good positioning. Luke, in the first half, every time they came in his corridor, the cross came in and a dangerous situation was coming. I was not happy with his performance.”
Reports suggest United players think Shaw is being “bullied” by his pouting manager. Mourinho says only Nemanja Matic and Romelu Lukaku – the goalscorers against Brighton – would escape his anger. The rest possessed “a lack of personality, lack of class and lack of desire”. When you get schooled in class by Mourinho, you give Dr Eva Carneiro the side eye and check your finger for bits of eyeball.
“I didn’t have many managers in my life but he is special because he wants to win always,” says Matic, in full teacher’s pet mode. “You can see when we lose a game he cannot accept that. Probably that’s why he won more than 20 trophies in his life. It is very difficult to work with him because he always wants more and more. Even if you win the league he wants to win again next season. He is like this and the players need to be ready for that. Because at this high level, at Manchester United and where I used to play Chelsea, the players need to be ready for that because the pressure is big. Everyone expects you to win every game. Obviously it is not possible, but supporters always expect. It doesn’t matter if you are tired or not, supporters want high quality football. It is normal.”
He had us up to ‘high quality’. Mourinho’s win at all costs approach is anathema to the so-called Manchester United way. At Chelsea and Inter Milan, success-starved clubs with no adherence to a style, Mourinho delivering silverware was the be all. Does grinding out a result work at United?
Alex Ferguson used to give under-performing players a blast of the ‘hairdryer’. But always in private. Mourinho makes it all about him. In reviewing Mourinho’s turgid 12-minute speech delivered after United’s defeat to Sevilla in the Champions League, Oliver Holt spoke for many:
Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address lasted two minutes. Martin Luther King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech lasted 17 minutes. John F Kennedy’s Inauguration Speech lasted 14 minutes. Winston Churchill’s ‘Fight on the Beaches’ speech lasted 34 minutes.
Acclaimed as football’s answer to all of them, Jose Mourinho’s self-serving, self-aggrandising, self-regarding, self-pitying, melodramatic, hard-luck claptrap that passed for his attempt at oratory on Friday afternoon lasted 12 minutes. His only theme was Jose Mourinho. He used his moment on the stage to deliver a homage to himself.
Ask not what Mourinho can do for Manchester United but what Manchester United can do for him. His was a dystopian vision of a great football club as a vehicle for a narcissist. His was a speech that denigrated United so that he could vindicate himself. Some managers subjugate themselves to their clubs. Mourinho asks that the club subjugates itself to him.
Holt’s a United fan. They want better.
Posted: 19th, March 2018 | In: manchester united, News, Sports Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
