There has long been a debate, which has no answer, about which is the stronger emotion between love and hate. Both can be equally destructive and, when felt in the right context, both can be equally rewarding although hate is usually by far the more negative of the two.
In the Premier League’s top six there are three outstanding managers and a fourth who manages to stand out even from the outstanding.
To José Mourinho, the glass is always half empty which, to his way of thinking, is better than being completely empty. To the other three, the glass is always half full and their ambition is to fill it to the brim!
The Portuguese, despite not having the backing of 100% of the United fans, has his team in second place and will probably finish the season there. He has them in the semi-final of the FA Cup, only needing to beat Tottenham Hotspur away to reach the final and then he can have a short rest before doing it all again.
Yes, United would appear to have regressed somewhat on the trophy front as, last season, they won three. But it has to be remembered that they won two ‘B’ trophies and the Community Shield. This season they have competed, for a short while, in the Champion’s League and have a chance in the FA Cup whilst their Premier League position will have improved by four places providing they stay where they are. So improvement has certainly been made.
From a supporter’s point of view the problem is that United, more often than not, tend to set up not to lose games rather than to win them and this goes back to Mourinho’s baptismal years in the Premier League when he realised that for him to bring long-awaited success to Chelsea he had to make them difficult to beat.
As everybody knows, he achieved this and won their first title in fifty years but he had now decided how his teams needed to play to win the Premier League. He was right for a while!
Pep Guardiola and Jürgen Klopp spent their formative years competing at the top end of the leagues in their home countries.
Guardiola had some not bad players at Barcelona!
Pep, with Barcelona, could afford to continue the expansive football started by Johan Cruyff as he only really needed to worry about Real Madrid so, providing his team was good enough, they could continue to attack regardless of the opposition simply because it was what they did ALL season. They didn’t change tactics for different games, they just went out to beat teams.
Jürgen Klopp was in a similar position with Borussia Dortmund whereby his big games were always against Bayern Münich but, he too, could afford to attack them because his team were beating everybody else with relative ease.
So they both arrived in the Premier League with their individual attacking philosophies already well established as the main factor in their being successful, but when Mourinho arrived he had to develop a philosophy and, despite being the opposite to those of the other two, it was also successful for several years.
In fact it was only with the arrivals of Jürgen Klopp and Pep Guardiola that Mourinho’s tactics were called into question. Liverpool were now genuine title rivals to United and City were better than them!
Add to this the emergence of Mauricio Pochettino at Tottenham and Mourinho, much to his dismay, now has a four way scrap for the title providing that City can be rivalled next season. If not, then there will be a three way scrap for second place again.
The other two usual suspects have some hard decisions to make. Arséne Wenger, as regular readers will be aware, is not rated very highly nowadays by this publication and his time at Arsenal should have come to an end three or four years ago. It didn’t and those years, in our humble opinion, have been wasted.
We will be very surprised, however, if he is there next season. The modern game is passing him by as he sits, almost like a fisherman, on the sidelines waiting for something to happen instead of making something happen.
Conte and Wenger, neither of whom are likely to be in their current position next season
Antonio Conte is also likely to leave his current club at the end of this season. With accolades for his “remarkable” achievement of winning the Premier League in his first season at Chelsea still ringing in his ears, he is likely to take off back to Italy or over to France.
We prefer to judge Conte on his second season which has seen him fall well short of the required standards. Yes, he won the title last season but he was certainly aided by not having any type of European football and by having one of the best squads in the division. This season has been woeful and will end, maybe with an FA Cup, but definitely without Champion’s League qualification.
So two of the London clubs will be work-in-progress next season and this will give Spurs the chance to establish themselves as the capital’s numero uno and try and match the northern clubs.
Klopp’s Liverpool will improve again and, unfortunately for everybody else, Guardiola’s City probably will as well. This leaves Mourinho with a dilemma to which he will never admit. He either continues his philosophy of not losing many games which should continue to see United finish in the top four reasonably comfortably but will also see him out of a job before long, or he changes tactics and tries to win the Premier League which his current modus operandi is unlikely to achieve.
WHY SAY ANYTHING? 