- Jun 7, 2004
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I think Jose is the one who does not believe. If he put some faith in the players maybe we could actually be allowed to have some possession but like Chelsea and ManU under JM in recent years we have become a park the bus side ... a sort of upmarket Stoke
There isn't a "Mourinho approach". He's always been a pragmatic manager, unlike Pochettino, who is an idealist manager who casts his teams in a prescribed way of playing. Mourinho has always tweaked the tactics to the opposition and his available squad. Pochettino has a vision of football in his head that he demands from his squad.The problem is I don't see how the mourinho approach is going to win is trophies. Then what are left with a succession of ruined weekends and nothing to show for it, not even memories of great attacking performances or a ridiculous piece of skill. I remember the fa cup win but I look back more fondly on the screamer gazza scored in the semi final more.
As I posted the other day, Mourinho is trying to scuffle an inherited squad through to the end of the season in a Champions-League-qualifying position and, until both of our world-class strikers were struck by season-ending injuries, he was on track to achieve that.
I reckon he has used two or three different "Mourinho approaches" already since he arrived, all in response to the injuries to four tactically key players: Davies, Sissoko, Kane and Son. But they're all improvisations, not an approach. None of them represents what he wants to do - he's said so several times in interviews, with varying degrees of ruefulness, using increasingly fanciful analogies.
Wherever we end up this season, the squad renovation will continue this summer and we can start to judge what the current "Mourinho approach" is next autumn, after he has had a chance at a pre-season with his squad.
More generally, the fallacy underlying the previous several pages of bad-tempered bitching is that the manager and the club ownership plan out our player transfers with the current season in mind. No club ever does this, unless they are threatened by relegation.
Mourinho would never have considered signing a striker in January with the current season in mind - he said almost exactly that in an interview about a week or two ago. Only fans think that way. If a suitable loan had been available, that might have been different, but what high quality striker would have signed a long term contract with a club that already had Kane and Son on its books?
Player transfers are never aimed at the current season and the reams and pages of fans complaining about it will never change that.