This past weekend saw Jose Mourinho in a bullish mood. With Leicester City dutifully dispatched in the Premier League opener, the Portuguese manager took time out ahead of the match against Brighton and Hove Albion to take aim at Manchester City’s new Amazon documentary series “All or Nothing.”
“My reaction is if you are a rich club you can buy top players, you cannot buy class,” said Mourinho. “The second reaction is because I am in the movie I could ask for some royalties. But if they send me one of the shirts they had in the tunnel when we played there, the shirts that were saying ‘We did it on derby day.’ If they send me one of these shirts, I give up about the royalties.”
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It was vintage Mourinho, looking beyond a winnable match to take jabs at a perceived enemy elsewhere. Unfortunately for the manager, Brighton was not as winnable as he might have thought, and for the first time since 2015, Manchester United conceded three goals in the first half of a football game. A Lukaku header and Paul Pogba pity penalty to make the final score 3-2 did little to mask the deficiencies in Manchester United’s play and talk of crisis at the club has begun.
Supposedly. For if Manchester City’s documentary is called All or Nothing, perhaps this saga at Old Trafford is best dubbed “I Am Saying Nothing”.
That is the line that Jose Mourinho and Paul Pogba seem to have adopted; both men have made a point of not saying what they think about the current situation at Manchester United. Following the Leicester result, Pogba said, “There are things, and there are things that I cannot say, otherwise I will get fined.”
And following the 3-2 defeat to Brighton, Jose Mourinho spoke of not wanting to pass negative comments on individual players, saying, “When I am critical with my players you just don’t accept it, so please do not ask me to go in this direction because it is not good for me.”
It’s a masterclass in passive aggressive conversation that looks set to rumble on well into next week and beyond as the Mourinho’s third season takes its familiar, farcical shape. That, only two weeks into the season, a senior source at Manchester United confided in The Guardian that there was no job available at the club for Zinedine Zidane only underlined the… interesting times at the club. Nothing is being properly said, which actually says quite a lot.
And then Paul Pogba’s agent Mino Raiola started tweeting and everything started being said.
Paul Scholes should become sports director and advise Woodward to sell Pogba. Would be sleepless nights to find Pogba a new club @paulpogba
— Mino Raiola (@MinoRaiola) August 21, 2018
Some people need to talk for fear of being forgotten. Paul Scholes wouldn’t recognize a leader if he was in front of Sir Winston Churchill. @paulpogba
— Mino Raiola (@MinoRaiola) August 21, 2018
Those Paul Pogba @s were pointed sign-offs. While the transfer window is closed for English clubs, those around Europe are still conducting business until the end of August. Rumours persist that Barcelona are interested in a potential £100m deal for Pogba, which, however unlikely that seems, does add an interesting element in the war of unspoken words. Gary Neville, was first to the the garrison:
Let’s hope @paulpogba leads his agent and shuts him up !
— Gary Neville (@GNev2) August 21, 2018
Neville was soon followed by Mike Phelan, former assistant manager at Manchester United and one of Sir Alex Ferguson’s trusted lieutenants.
There was a time when a players ability, consistency, attitude, record and application generated transfer activity
— Mike Phelan (@Mike_Phelan_1) August 21, 2018
At time of writing, Paul Pogba is still matchday captain of Manchester United while Antonio Valencia recovers from a calf injury. The imminent return of Nemanja Matic from abdominal injury may also shore up the team’s midfield ahead of the Spurs game on the 27th. There are still questions over how the defense, long considered a Mourinho coaching strong point, was so easily breached by Brighton, and David De Gea’s reversion to the mean is worrying.
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There is one positive that fans can hang onto no matter the outcome of Pogba’s immediate future. Namely, Manchester United cannot be as bad as they were at the Amex Stadium against Brighton, if only because there is no where else to go after rock bottom.
But with Mourinho’s next press conference not scheduled until Friday, United fans will have to wait a little longer for the next episode of this story. That’s one more advantage Manchester City have: with their documentary streaming on Amazon, the next bit of good entertainment is only a click away.
(Photo: IAN KINGTON/AFP/Getty Images)
