WHY SAY ANYTHING?

Whilst we here at WSA have very little time, if any, for Ed Woodward and the role he is obviously unable to fulfill at Manchester United, we are also getting a little tired of José Mourinho’s barbed comments whereby everything that is wrong with the club is someone else’s fault.

We know he has been one of the most successful club managers ever. How could we not know when he insists on reminding us at every opportunity?

We also know that he appears to remain dedicated to the cause at Old Trafford despite still not settling in Manchester and despite, having spent more than £300 million since his arrival, seeing the team regress.

He may think that second place last season was an over-achievement which of course, with Mourinho, is his way of pointing out what a great job HE did, but he can hardly excuse the team currently sitting in 10th place.

Whilst it is true that he didn’t spend much during the last transfer window, only bringing in Fred and Diogo Dalot, nobody of note left the club so why have they not improved.

Well, to start with, Fred and Dalot can’t get into the team. Add Eric Bailly to these two and three of his “improvements” aren’t working out just yet.

If he doesn’t think they are good enough then why did he buy them? Dalot, for one, HAS to be an improvement on Ashley Young who, despite still being caught continuously out of position and prone to giving away stupid free-kicks due to his inability to defend, has not only been selected regularly ahead of the Portuguese but has been made captain! That, in itself, goes a long way to explaining at least some of the problems at the club. Had he been at The Etihad with Pep Guardiola he would have been sold two years ago along with Clichy, Zabaleta and Sagna!

One of these two or Chris Smalling? What a dilemma that wouldn’t be!

Following the defeat to Juventus in the Champion’s League Mourinho was full of praise for, amongst others, Leonardo Bonucci and Giorgio Chiellini, the opposition’s two ageing centre-backs. This was a thinly veiled dig at Woodward who had failed to deliver any of Mourinho’s targetted centre-backs during the last window.

He then praised Smalling and Lindelof as if realising that continuing to laud the opposition would hardly have a positive effect on his own players.

The bottom line, however, is that Mourinho bought Lindelof and Bailly when, at the time, he could have requested Alderweireld and Maguire, but didn’t. Maguire could have been purchased from Hull before he even went to Leicester but, as usual, United scouts would have been at the San Siro or The Bernabeu or, more likely, in a pub somewhere.

Alderweireld probably wouldn’t have needed much persuading to leave Tottenham Hotspur and Woodward would not have had the excuse that Mourinho was trying to buy ageing players no better than those he already had at the club.

As we said, Woodward himself doesn’t come out of this unscathed as he should just be trying to buy the players his manager wants, not passing opinion on them when he clearly has little or no idea about the game, (he is from Cheltenham after all).

So the malaise at Old Trafford may be, in part, the fault of others but the fact remains that José Mourinho is now in his third year at the club. In his first they won three trophies. In his second they finished runners-up in the Premier League and now, in his third, they sit tenth. If this pattern is allowed to continue to it’s logical conclusion then, by around 2024 United will be relegated.

By then, of course, Mourinho will have moved to pastures new, still telling all who will listen how brilliant he used to be and what a great team United would have become had it not been for other people messing up.