Perhaps Jose Mourinho is just playing the long game. After all, Manchester United’s miserable elimination by Sevilla in the last 16 of the Champions League may look bad, at first blush. But it ensures United will not concede a single goal in the quarter-finals. Or in the semis. Or in the final. That surely deserves a contract extension.
Manchester United still doesn’t know how to be the favorite
Jose Mourinho has all the typical Jose Mourinho stuff down, but his team is still best at playing like underdogs.
Photo by Clive Mason/Getty Images
They are a strange kind of shambles, this Manchester United team. One step forward, one step back. Then two steps sideways. Then — oh! they’ve punched themselves in the face. Second in the league, and definitively better than last season; out of Europe before the quarter-finals. Rousing comebacks against Chelsea and Crystal Palace, then a skilled defanging of Liverpool, followed by one of the limpest, most supine performances in recent memory against Sevilla.
To say Manchester United should have beaten Sevilla over two legs is not quite the point. In any case, should is a tricky word in sport, one laden with overtones of arrogance and presumption. But it’s certainly fair to say that United should have put together a far better attempt to beat Sevilla, and not spent two legs looking like a team with no attacking plan beyond “exist, be richer than them, win?”
After the game, Mourinho suggested the performance, at least at the beginning, wasn’t all that bad:
“We tried to be aggressive and intense from the first minute. We didn’t score and Sevilla progressively kept the ball, and they controlled the game well.”
Your mileage may differ, though it’s perhaps instructive as to what Mourinho is looking for. United didn’t collapse in the opening stages of the game last night, but they didn’t really do anything constructive. With every minute that drifted past, United kicked the problem of actually winning the game onto the next, in the process making any Sevilla goal that much more wounding. So what we got in the end was a lesson on the poverty of pragmatism — or at least, this strange parody of pragmatism that United appear to be hooked upon.
The line between pragmatism and cowardice, or pragmatism and brute incompetence, is defined not just by approach but also by the task in hand. For the favourites in a two-legged European tie, there is nothing pragmatic about picking up a nil-nil draw in the away leg, and nothing pragmatic about stretching that nil-nil out into the latter stages of the home leg. Both are wasted opportunities: the former to kill the tie, or at least pick up an away goal or two, and the latter to prevent the sucker punches that Sevilla landed last night.
Unflattering comparisons have been drawn all season between United and their rivals, City and Liverpool. Mostly, these have been questions of style: the freewheeling, front-foot attacking of the other two set against the pinched, ball-averse, reactive game of United. But in the Champions League last-16, we saw those styles deployed to pragmatic ends. Liverpool went to Porto and scored five, while City went to Basel and scored four. They looked good, but more importantly they killed the tie. And so City losing the second leg 2-1 at home is no more than a footnote, while United doing the same is a disaster.
It’s seems almost stupid to write “there is a pragmatic value in trying to actually win games” but, well, there we are. Particularly in Europe, over two legs, when a good result in the first game can render the second much more comfortable. For the favourites to go into the last 20 minutes of a two-legged game at nil-nil … that’s not pragmatic, safety-first football, but an appalling dereliction of duty. Clearly, Palace and Chelsea just took the lead too early.
So what have the last few weeks of big United games taught us? We know they can, if provoked with enough time remaining, muster a stirring comeback. We know, too, they can work to a specific plan and neutralise a dangerous opponent. What we still don’t really know is whether they can walk into a game as favourites, play like favourites, and win as favourites. If they can act, rather than react. And if they can’t, as has often seemed to be the case this season, then why not? They’ve got the players for it.
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