Oliver Kay's piece from The Athletic:
The past is where Jose Mourinho used to seek refuge in times of trouble. It is a place that might be likened to Aladdin’s cave of wonders, with trophies and medals piled high. Twenty-six titles, as he might have mentioned once or twice while insisting it should really be 31.
Over time, though, returns have diminished, rivals have emerged and the “Special One” aura has faded somewhat. Memories of an upstart coach lording it over European football’s aristocracy have been replaced by those of his miserable final months at Chelsea and Manchester United, where he turned every match and every press conference into a war of attrition. Regarding him through the prism of his often-glorious past no longer guarantees quite such a flattering perspective.
If we have learned anything conclusive during his first three months in charge at Tottenham Hotspur, it is that, for better or increasingly for worse, his past now stalks him at every turn. Win a game and he will find himself lauded for a “Mourinho masterclass”. Lose a game, as he did at his former club Chelsea on Saturday, and he will be lambasted for negativity. There is so little middle ground, which is is all the stranger given that his work so far has been… well, fair to middling.
When Mourinho took over from Mauricio Pochettino on November 20, Tottenham were 14th in the Premier League, 11 points adrift of the top four. Fifteen games later, they are sixth, four points behind fourth-placed Chelsea, hence the overwhelming sense of an opportunity missed when they lost 2-1 at Stamford Bridge on Saturday. Eight wins from his first 15 Premier League games in charge would best be described as solid rather than spectacular but only Liverpool and Manchester City have taken more points over that period.
In other words, Mourinho is doing OK. Yes, this is a group of players that reached the Champions League final last season but they had also won just six of their final 24 Premier League matches under their previous manager. Pochettino did an excellent job, inspiring a level of individual and collective improvement, raising expectations and standards, but things went stale and, sadly, there no longer seemed to be the energy, on either side, to get things on track. The inevitable change has brought an improvement, albeit not on the scale hinted at when they won their first three games under Mourinho.
The fascination with Mourinho brings a temptation — always — to judge from game to game, even from press conference to press conference. Every manager’s tactics, utterances and body languages are analysed these days but none with such rigour as his. We are always searching for an immediate judgment, usually one in keeping with an established, entrenched viewpoint based on a career that has brought so many highs but also a few notable lows.
I’m saying this as someone who has questioned Mourinho’s past two appointments and rarely sung his praises since he led Chelsea to a third Premier League title in 2015. His final months at Stamford Bridge seemed like a masterclass in how to lose friends and alienate people. Things unravelled in his third season at Manchester United, too — and, while he might still claim that leading them to a runners-up finish in year two was one of his greatest achievements, it rarely felt like he was building anything of substance. His approach in recent years has been to paper and, where possible, gloss over cracks. He has won trophies but it has all turned sour very quickly after that.
At Tottenham, though, his first task, his overriding priority, has been to paper over the cracks that appeared towards the end of Pochettino’s tenure. He did that for the first few weeks but then came an injury to Harry Kane, the failure to sign cover during the January transfer and now the loss of Son Heung-min for the foreseeable future. The cracks widened once more with defeats by RB Leipzig and Chelsea, games in which Tottenham struggled in the absence of an attacking outlet. In the absence of Kane and Son, his two most reliable goalscorers, Mourinho spoke on Saturday about needing to adopt “strange game plans”, such as playing Steven Bergwijn atop a 5-4-1 formation. There was, he said, “not another way”.
Some supporters point to the potential of Troy Parrott but, unless all other options have been exhausted, Mourinho is not the type to put his faith in a centre-forward who has just turned 18. Not many managers are. Kane, at the same age, had three years of mostly-difficult loan spells ahead of him before his form in the Europa League, combined with the struggles of Roberto Soldado and Emmanuel Adebayor, earned him an opportunity he seized with both hands. Marcus Rashford’s breakthrough as an 18-year-old at Manchester United, under Louis van Gaal in 2016, came as a result of an injury crisis even more extreme than Tottenham’s right now.
For Mourinho, a centre-forward is not just someone to carry the goalscoring burden. It is one of several fixed points in a line-up. There was a moment during Liverpool’s 1-0 win at Tottenham last month when Gary Neville, in the commentary box, lauded the exceptional talents of Roberto Firmino, suggesting that “any manager in the world would love to have him as their centre-forward”; but it was not quite true. It takes a certain type of coach to build his forward line around a player such as Firmino. Mourinho has never been that type. It is not because the Liverpool player lacks the consistent goal threat of a Kane, more a question of the rugged qualities that the Tottenham manager looks for in centre-forwards — “a striker, what I call a No 9, a target man,” as he put it recently. Son, he spelt out, “is not a striker”.
With all of this in mind, it seems extraordinary that Tottenham failed to sign a traditional centre-forward in January to cover Kane’s absence. Olivier Giroud remained a serious target as late as transfer deadline day but Chelsea blocked that move and, looking at it now, you wonder whether they were toying with their London rivals. United might have attracted some derision when they signed Odion Ighalo on loan from Shanghai Shenhua but one suspects that Mourinho, after Tottenham’s unsuccessful late play for the former Watford forward, was more disappointed than he has been willing to let on at this early stage of his tenure.
By goodness he is gloomy, though. Some managers go to extraordinary, excruciating lengths to accentuate the positives in defeat. Mourinho often goes to the other extreme. On Saturday, he warned of a “long, difficult” few months ahead for Tottenham, saying that the immediate situation “cannot be better, can only be worse.” It is a classic case of expectation management — underpromise, overdeliver — but it seems remarkably, disconcertingly dour in the age of Jurgen Klopp, Pep Guardiola, Brendan Rodgers and a new wave of coaches who steadfastly avoid setting such a negative tone in their public pronouncements.
One of the main challenges for Mourinho is to avoid such negativity taking hold of Tottenham now that it seems fair to say his honeymoon period — those three early wins, that cute stunt with the ball-boy, the disarming smiles and wisecracks in press conferences and yet another round of “Oh, isn’t he so much more mellow this time?” — is over. There have been some welcome shows of spirit, the late winners at Wolverhampton Wanderers and Aston Villa and weathering an almighty storm before overcoming Manchester City, but, in terms of performances, it sometimes feels as if that papering-over-the-cracks aspect of the task has rendered all else irrelevant.
So far, Mourinho has earned 1.73 points per game at Tottenham. Broadly speaking, in a typical season, that would be top-six form rather than top-four form. Among that spate of high-profile appointments before the turn of the year, that puts him below Carlo Ancelotti at Everton (1.89 points per game) and ahead of Mikel Arteta at Woolwich (1.55 points per game). In all three cases, that is an improvement on their predecessor. In Arteta’s case, the upturn in performance has been more noticeable than that in results. In Mourinho’s case, it has probably been the opposite, which he would probably say is just as well.
For a different kind of comparison, with another manager who took over a squad in a state of dysfunction following a troubled start to a season, Klopp won six, drew four and lost five of his first 15 Premier League games after joining Liverpool in October 2015. The defeats were terrible (3-0 at Watford, 2-0 at Newcastle United and West Ham United, 2-1 at home to Crystal Palace), in keeping with what was to be an inconsistent run, but some of those early victories (3-1 at Mourinho’s Chelsea, 4-1 at Manchester City and, in the League Cup, 6-1 away to Southampton) set a standard, as the season went on, that was met with ever greater consistency over the next four years.
Even at that terribly inconsistent stage, with line-ups that were almost unrecognisable from the one that beat Tottenham in last season’s Champions League final, you could see what Klopp was trying to achieve. There was speed, there was energy and there was more fluency in Liverpool’s attacking play. Arteta is clearly trying to do something similar with Woolwich. That same kind of stylistic progression has been little in evidence so far at Tottenham. It is all about results and, if Mourinho’s delivers Champions League qualification or indeed the FA Cup, there will be no cause for him apologise for the way such objectives were achieved.
There remains something incongruous about Mourinho as Tottenham manager. Not as incongruous as George Graham in the same position a couple of decades ago but it still feels strange that things unravelled like that for Pochettino, whose philosophy had been so fundamental to the club’s resurgence, and that the Argentinian’s legacy was entrusted to a manager with such a markedly different approach. A personal view, at the time of Pochettino’s departure, was that they needed to find someone who would continue his work, rather than head off in a different direction.
It is what it is, though, and, just as three wins in his first week in charge didn’t make Mourinho’s appointment a masterstroke, neither do back-to-back defeats, with his two most reliable goalscorers missing, make him a disaster. Even now, for all his warnings about difficult times ahead, this season offers more possibilities than it did at the time of his arrival. Cracks have been papered over and, so far at least, results have picked up.
If we were calling it a first-quarter performance review, there would be signs of encouragement and some equally obvious areas for improvement. The time for more serious, weighty appraisals will come next season, when he has had more time to implement his ideas and, one hopes, to look beyond the short term. It might go against the grain where Mourinho is concerned but we really are going to have to defer judgment for a while at least.
