What's cute is the way people systematically go out of their way to reduce the quality of our playing squad to justify their dislike for justified criticism levelled at the manager.
So much so that the likes of Blind, Darmian and Shaw - who never even play - are referenced as the sort of "deadwood" that causes us problems.
Get rid of 'em all, we read. But who, exactly? Pogba? Martial? Rashford? Bailly? Honestly, who?
You still get people arguing the toss that it's the players letting down the manager. But who?
As far as I can see Mourinho has bought two centre halves that can't get a game. He has gone out of his way to make sure that Valencia and Young play at full back every week. He gets all the effort in the world from Matic and Herrera, while Pogba is one of our best players. He's responsible for buying Lukaku and Sanchez. Lingard has had the best season of his career.
Who are these players letting down the manager, refusing to follow his orders and actively seeking to throw in the towel? Because it's fairly apparent to me that this is fictitious and not at all true.
Season after season it's the same nonsense. Sell the players, buy some new ones. We do that and they falter. So much so that bona fide brilliant players are coming here and then described as
not all that. Bad attitudes, all of them. Although it didn't seem to stop the likes of Di Maria, Pogba and Sanchez performing for top clubs in big games before they signed for the club.
Who else do we need to buy for them to come here and be written off? Messi? Ronaldo? I'd say I'm being a little facetious but I'm not. It would take about three weeks of this continued dross for people to pollute the Ronaldo player thread with claims that coming back was a bad idea, the league has moved on and that his legs have gone.
The bottom line is that our attacking football is woeful. We still struggle to score goals and we are joyless. This is Mourinho's fault. He's accountable for it. He has more than enough at his disposal to be playing significantly better football than what we currently watch. This isn't about the title or the cup final. It's about getting more from what is already there. He doesn't do that. That some of the players aren't all that happy is to be expected. It's shit. The reason you don't hear similar stories coming out of Liverpool or City is because Klopp and Guardiola allow them to play with a bit of joy and don't spend half the season playing out pathetic games in the media to 'motivate' the players.
I looked up our goal for in the last 10 campaigns under Fergie. We have had some relatively lean periods in terms of goals. We've racked up 54 and 68 goals in our two seasons under Mourinho (yay, progress!) In the previous 10 seasons under Fergie (2002/3 - 2012/13) we scored the following number of league goals*:
74, 64, 58, 72,
83,
80,
68, 86,
78, 89,
86. The closest we've come to playing similarly low-scoring football we've had with Mourinho in charge was in the seasons leading up to that "
shredding his legacy at every turn" piece that still haunts Rob Smyth. More often than not, we've scored a good 10+ more league goals each season under Fergie than we have during Mourinho's tenure, so the impression that we were more prolific under Fergie is backed up by the stats.
That said, the leanest spells under Fergie happened during a root and branch overhaul of the squad and you could argue that this is exactly what Mourinho has been lumbered with. So there are definitely mitigating circumstances. The problem Jose has with keeping the fans on board is that all the other big clubs afford their managers far less patience than United have shown Fergie in the past and our rivals in the league do seem to be finding it much easier than us to rack up a decent number of goals each season. Which makes our attacking football look that bit more inept, in comparison, even though our points total is nothing to be sniffed at.
*title-winning seasons underlined
Our goals scored stats really are damning when laid out like that.
