With his job reportedly on the line on Saturday, Jose Mourinho turned to what he knew. Before him was a Newcastle side that had won two points all season, scoring only four goals, and yet the Manchester United manager deployed a midfield battering ram to quell any latent threat the Magpies might pose in his hour of vulnerability. The surrender that followed may have tempted Mourinho to hang his hat there and then, as Newcastle became the first side in Premier League history to score twice in ten opening Old Trafford minutes.
There was a feeling of despondency that harked back to the anguish that supporters had felt when Mourinho’s Chelsea had a stranglehold on the Premier League over a decade ago. Yet Mourinho, with hope wearing thin after only 19 minutes, seemed to abandon the principles of power and vigour that had earned him such immense success in the days of Lampard and Drogba by resorting to the most antithetical player to those trusted Chelsea aide-de-camps, Juan Mata. Mata, United’s slight, nuanced midfielder, provided the creative spark that had been so glaringly bereft in Mourinho’s athletic, rangey trio of Paul Pogba, Nemanja Matic and Scott McTominay, and scored the first in United’s three-goal comeback with an impeccably-executed free-kick.
It might be now, if Saturday’s win does turn out to be Mourinho’s Mark Robins moment, that the Portuguese sees fit to more frequently profit from from the ingenuity that the Mata offers at Old Trafford, particularly when the opposition will set up to defend. Mata is, after all, the man most likely to unpick a stubborn defence after providing more chances – relative to minutes played – than any other United player during Mourinho’s two-and-a-half year tenure at the club, most of which have come from a wide position. This is a player, it is easy to forget, who provided 25 assists in two phenomenal seasons operating in Chelsea’s no.10 position, and his is an avenue surely worth exploring should Mourinho be weaned off a dependency on powerful midfield athletes in an age where slender-framed intelligence tends to prosper. “I will say that today the victory is a pride victory,” Mata opined on Saturday evening, after Alexis Sanchez’s late winner.
“I felt that on the pitch, I did not want to feel another sadness feeling, another disappointment feeling.” Perhaps further employment of the Spanish ‘Johnny Kills’ would go some way to bringing happiness back to Old Trafford.
