WHY SAY ANYTHING?

Manchester United have an excellent record against the other five members of this season’s top six. They also have a pretty atrocious record against the recently promoted teams.

This was in evidence again in their pathetic performance against Brighton at the Amex Stadium. The roles could have been reversed and it would have been easy to believe that the south coast club were fighting for second place whilst United were trying to avoid the drop!

José Mourinho, as is often the case this season, spoke with his usual forked tongue in his post-match interview with one of Sky TV’s many “masters of stupid questions”, Geoff Shreeves.

Without merely producing a transcript of his comments and calling it an article, which is what many other publications, including Manchester United themselves, have done, we would point out that saying he is happy with the squad and doesn’t want to sell ANY of his players one minute, is in stark contradiction to his comments regarding some of his players on Friday night.

The bigger question is; if he knows the players as well as he keeps telling everybody he does and knew this performance was possible, then why did he select those players at all?

To prove why he doesn’t pick them every week!? This was the reason suggested by the manager and, if true, it’s a pretty staggering admission. To say that players have been selected for a Premier League game just to show people why they are not selected regularly for Premier League games is a trifle childish. All the interview was short of was Mourinho sticking his tongue out and saying, “there, I told you so!”

Martial and Rashford are good in bursts and have all the potential but neither is consistent enough to be a regular starter

He also made it clear that, in his opinion, some people think United players are better than they really are. There is an element of truth in that because neither Rashford nor Martial, for example, are ready for regular first team football yet but there have been clamours for both to be starting every game.

One of Mourinho’s problems appears to be that HE thinks some United players are better than they really are.

Whenever he decides to give a “rest” to one of his ageing, unable to defend and past-it wingers, he seems at a loss as to who should replace him. He has two international full backs in the squad yet, against Brighton, couldn’t keep either Darmian or Shaw on the pitch for ninety minutes!

If he doesn’t think they are good enough, why are they still at the club?

He is also deluding himself if he thinks that ANY of his defenders, with the possible exception of Eric Bailly, would get into any of the other top six teams. There is a very good reason why David De Gea keeps winning the Player of the Year award and it’s called the United defence.

In the middle of the pitch Pogba still needs to find some consistency and Matić needs to rediscover his early season form. Mata and Herrera can both still do a job and the opposition should dictate which of the two plays in a three-man midfield. More importantly, as a team in general, they need to stop giving the ball away so easily.

Losing possession is one of United’s biggest, recurring problems. We have lamented, on countless occasions, their annoying habit of passing directly to the opposition. We have questioned as to whether or not any time whatsoever is spent correcting this major flaw on the training ground and have come to the conclusion that it isn’t. It still happens far too regularly so, obviously, the situation hasn’t been addressed or, if it has, the players are even worse than we thought they were!

Whilst watching the game on Friday it was so annoying that, at one stage, we were calling for Mourinho to build a new team around De Gea and Sánchez and sell everybody else! It really was that bad!

Mourinho could do worse than build a team round these two!

Realistically that won’t happen and some of the very average players on the books at Old Trafford will, no doubt, remain on the books at Old Trafford. Something, however, has to give.

As Gary Neville said in one of his rare bright moments, either Mourinho has to go or some of the players have to go. Mourinho has enough credit with United’s supporters and board to know that he will be backed in any major decisions.

Unlike his spells at Real Madrid and Chelsea, where he was an individual with less power than a collection of really good players, at United he is an individual with MORE power than a collection of really average players and he needs to use some of that power this summer.

If he is to continue to blame the players for United’s woes, but then does nothing about it, the day the blame switches to him isn’t too far away.