Mourinho shifts blame to avoid park the bus criticism

The Manchester United manager focused on his Liverpool counterpart to avoid criticism.

José Mourinho criticised Jürgen Klopp’s tactics to take the attention away from his team’s negative performance. It was obvious that United were happy to play for the draw as he prioritised a strong defensive shape with his tactical setup.

Liverpool dominated the game across all the key metrics with xG being the most pivotal stat. However, they still had to share the points, so Mourinho accomplished his objective.

The main point of Mourinho’s argument was that Klopp’s substitutions were all straight swaps rather than a shift in system to take more risks. This is a relatively fair assessment, but it’s understandable that Klopp did this because they needed a result. A loss would have been a huge blow for the Reds, so risking it wasn’t worth it. Prior to the match, Liverpool only had one win in eight games in all competitions. Therefore, this result was necessary to build confidence.

This was just an example of Mourinho trying to control the headlines. He may have played for a point, but he would have been annoyed with his teams’ lack of attacking edge. There were also significant attacking options on the bench which he could have utilised. Although, they lacked another central midfielder option to negate Liverpool’s man advantage in midfield as he stated after the match.

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The boring nature of the Red Devils’ performance also had ramifications beyond what Mourinho could have envisaged. A few hours after the match, Manchester City dispatched Stoke 7-2 in probably the best team performance in the league this season. The Citizens expertly showcased Pep Guardiola’s Juego de Posicion style.

Conclusions

Mourinho will inevitably be criticised for performances such as this because of the sheer amount of money he has spent. He will also continue to be directly compared with Guardiola; they share a city as well as a fierce rivalry. While Guardiola’s team obtain results with aesthetically pleasing performances, Mourinho’s style will continue to be negatively compared with it. This is completely justified. City expertly pulled apart Liverpool to win 5-0 when they played them as a direct contrast.

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This is unlikely to affect Mourinho, though, because the ends justify the means for him. Whoever comes away with the title at the end of the season is the key factor for him. His record speaks for itself so it would be wrong to underestimate him; he has won the league in his second season with every club he has managed. Even with the gulf in performances between the Manchester teams, only two points separate them.