The ice melts sadly around the unopened champagne. The fireworks remain unfired, the streamers tightly furled. José Mourinho, perhaps the greatest wet blanket in football history, had done it again.
Manchester City’s celebrations will come but they are deferred, and that was Mourinho’s primary objective. But he has offered further evidence of this City side’s curious vulnerability, inflicted a trauma that might yet resurface to significant effect in the future and, more even than that, shown that, however much Pep Guardiola wants to make football a game of three-dimensional chess, he can drag him into a bar fight, play the game on his terms.
In January 2014 Mourinho’s Real Madrid went to the Camp Nou to face Barcelona in the second leg of a Copa del Rey tie. They trailed 2-1 from the first leg and fell 4-1 behind. With nothing left to lose, they attacked, came back and drew 2-2 on the night. It made no immediate difference and Barça went on to win the Cup but it blew away the sense of invulnerability Guardiola’s side had previously projected. Their aura gone, Barça dwindled to the end of the season, losing to Chelsea in the Champions League and surrendering their league title to Madrid.
It is far too early to suggest this game will similarly send the pendulum swinging back the other way. The teams are at different stages of their cycles and Guardiola does not seem as frazzled now as he did then. United, in truth, were extremely fortunate to win given the chances City missed and the penalty they were denied. But it is something and, in a season in which they have struggled to emerge from City’s shadow, they will take that.
Football has known few party poopers like Mourinho. He may not literally have broken up a party at one of his young player’s homes, wearing evening dress and calling them by their numbers rather than their names, as Sir Alex Ferguson famously did at a gathering at Lee Sharpe’s house, but he loves nothing more than stopping other people having fun.
He has the vague awareness of work in the morning, the barman who insists you have three minutes to drink the pint you bought two minutes ago even though you are pretty sure you are legally entitled to 20 minutes’ drinking-up time, the sour and neurotic former girlfriend who turns up and sits in passive aggressive disapproval until all hilarity has been sapped from the room.
Mourinho always seems at his most buoyant after puncturing somebody else’s balloon. He has rarely seemed more chipper than he did when dousing the boisterousness of a pre-Christmas crowd with a Chelsea performance of heroic lack of ambition in a 0-0 draw at Arsenal in 2013-14, unless it was later on that season when his side, with nothing to play for, went to Anfield, spoiled and wasted time and inflicted a 2-0 defeat that in effect cost Liverpool the title.
This was a different type of spoiling, although surely not by design. United were genuinely awful in the first half. Be more like Jürgen Klopp, they had said. Take a lesson from how Liverpool beat City on Wednesday. But the only aspect of Liverpool’s campaign United replicated, in both games against City, was the inability Klopp’s side showed earlier in the season to defend set plays. This City, as Liverpool demonstrated, are vulnerable. Their defence can be got at.
Attack them with pace and verve and they will struggle. United did not attack them before half-time and the result was that City, comfortable in possession, cut through them again and again.
Pogba, who at least got in the mood by dying his hair blue and white for the occasion, was, as so often, the barometer, terrible before half-time, inspirational after it. In the first half, his touch was poor, his use of the ball worse. Two goals in the first 10 minutes of the second half and suddenly he was winning every tackle, so dominant that Guardiola made a point of congratulating him at the final whistle.
At half-time it had seemed as though City could humiliate United, that this could be a beating for the ages, the sort of scoreline that could haunt a club. By the end, as the tackles flew in and tempers frayed, the sense was less of a United side coming together than of the fissure in City’s make-up being prised wider and wider. United, clearly, are still deep in the process of transition. They will not often get away with conceding the chances they conceded here. But they did point a huge finger at City’s soft underbelly and they may not be the only side to benefit from that in the future.
Mourinho, once again, could lap up the salt-tears of frustrated opponents as though they were the sweetest nectar.
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