Some very good points in there. I certainly agree with the notion that he needs to adapt his game to the particularities of modern football. I also believe he understands it and this maybe is the reason for his perpetual grumpiness over the last years. As i said in my first post, i don't expect him to completely change his ways but moderate alterations i'm sure he can think of. For instance, one of Tottenham's biggest strengths is that they tend to keep a relatively high defensive line and they apply pressing in the middle of the pitch. Not a very high line and not a very high press but it gets the job done in the sense that it allows them to win the ball in the middle of the park and hit the opposition right at its weakest point, between transitions (instead of going all the way back and then move the ball all the way up again as Fortitude mentioned in his post). I don't think that this is beyond his "teaching" capabilities or that it asks of him to betray his basic managerial principles. I'll wait and see what happens since this season i see a manager who at least acknowledges some things need fixing even though the changes he tries are not the ones some of us expect or wish.
I don't think he'll get a war chest from Woodward to buy himself the top side he wants. He'll get money for transfers all right, lots of it, but (for example) he won't get it to sign two world-class wingers when the club wants to invest on both Martial and Rashford. I might be wrong about this but i think this is one of the things for which he will have to find a solution on his own. I suspect that the final outcome of all minor to moderate alterations he will try in the attacking half of the pitch, because unlike LvG or Moyes he's started trying things, will play a big role in the pressure he will put on Woodward for transfers next summers and it will eventually determine his future relationship with the club (contract extension or not).
Having said that, i don't think that he's completely past it as some suggest. I acknowledge that the three most successful clubs in Europe lately, Real Madrid-Barcelona and Bayern Munich, play a far more pro-active type of football. It's also evident that all the more sides in the big European leagues attempt to make room in their starting lineups for more creative players instead of runners and hard workers. But, in the case of the three aforementioned clubs, we must also take into consideration that there are certain characteristics in the environments of their national leagues (separate TV deals in Spain, sugar daddies not allowed in Germany) which allow them to separate themselves from the rest of their competition and attract the cream of the crop out of pools of native talent that are currently much better than anything the island has to offer. Other than that, transition sides can be as antagonistic as the possession-based ones IMO. And i'm saying this as a fan of possesion football.
What i don't agree much with is that Mourinho doesn't teach any patterns of attacking play. I wrote in another thread that i can't believe that, in an era when any coaching staff has the means to watch and micro-analyze every bit of detail not only of a team's performance but of any individual player's performance, there's one single guy out there who's achieved being the most decorated manager over the last 15 years by simply neglecting what is basically half the game itself (the plays when a team has the ball). That's getting away with murder and i have watched so many of Mourinho's sides to believe that he's not getting away with murder.
What i believe is that this set of players can't execute his instructions to perfection. This doesn't mean that it's not a good set of players by any means, as some on here have suggested. Firstly, Mourinho's a very demanding and even draining, both physically and mentally, attacking plan. Because Mourinho is a defensive minded coach, he uses his astute defensive tactics to force the opponent to over commit players and then he wants the transitions to work with the bare minimum of players that are needed to complete the move from start to finish. This demands of the players very aggressive off the ball movement with dynamic-vertical runs, very quick thinking and exquisite technical skills. This is one difference (sometimes a strength, sometimes a weakness) he has from other transition/counter-attacking managers out there, Fergie included. You see, Ferguson always planned to take things from the second line of attack, from players from deeper positions. It's not that he prioritized attack over defense like some believe (it's never that simple) but he always relied on players from behind to contribute their share into pinning the opposition down and maintaining a high tempo/keeping a move alive and going. And by doing that he could rotate heavily and tinker with the players' roles because even the most important ones among them weren't the be-all end-all of his game plan. Whereas Mourinho drowned in a spoonful of water against Rafa's own parked bus twice and completely lost the plot against Dortmund when the most useful cog in his teams' wheel, Di Maria, missed the game.
But also keep in mind that when Ferguson came as close as he ever did to Mourinho's line of tactical thinking in 07-08 and 08-09 he was mostly successful. But then again he had an amazing attacking triangle and he often could afford to rotate Giggs and Scoles in their early 30's. Which i think would be Mou's line of defense, if someone showed him a thread like this one.
I think Mourinho can still make it work, one way or the other. I don't always like the football but for the first time in 5 years i (think i) can see what we're trying to do on the pitch even if it's not easy on the eye for many of us. But we'll see what happens, the next three games will tell us more about where we stand and what we can expect until the end of the season.
