Sky’s Guillem Balague is better known in Spain for writing for the AS newspaper, usually on all things to do with English football.
Aside from Pep Guardiola’s great immediate impact at Manchester City, Jose Mourinho doing the opposite at Manchester United is the big English story of interest in Spain at the moment.
Balague has written a column for AS on the situation, and said what many Manchester United fans are thinking: Wayne Rooney should be dropped.
The Spanish journalist believes persevering with Rooney is a mistake from Mourinho that may have been predictable given the manager’s previous choices: ‘Rooney, with erratic behaviour throughout his career, cannot be the team captain.
‘In fact, he should not even be a starter. Mourinho, as he has done at other clubs, aligned with the local star and wanted to become the only coach in more than five years able to squeeze juice out of a player who seems impossible to recover.
‘There are players that could be better alternatives (Martial, Rashford, Mata, Ander Herrera) but not all feel the confidence of Mourinho. And so it begins to erode the authority of the coach.’
Rooney hasn’t been a hero for many Manchester United fans for a long time, so if Mourinho’s plan was as stated then it wasn’t a very good one. Perhaps if the manager needed a sacrificial lamb then that man should have been Wayne Rooney, rather than Bastian Schweinsteiger.
Balague believes the methods of Mourinho aren’t working so far for Manchester United, such as the manager blaming players after a defeat, which is ‘All part of the usual script of Mourinho’.
The former Chelsea manager is facing one of the toughest tests of his career and there are certainly people hoping he fails, but Balague is right when he says: ‘It remains to be seen if the challenge of Manchester United has been too big to him, but meanwhile, Mourinho has a lot of work to do.
United shot between the posts four times against Feyenoord and two against Watford. Pogba, after being the best player in the game on his debut against Southampton, seems lost. His association with Fellaini makes United’s football rudimentary: against Watford the team created only seven times, the lowest number of the season. Defensively, individual errors are costing them points.
At Chelsea, Mourinho failed to reverse the situation. At United he must show that he has not lost his magic touch.’
If the Manchester United manager needed any further motivation to do well in his latest role, then he’s getting rafts of it daily from Spain. The Catalan media don’t like him, and he even managed to upset many in the Madrid media, who were supposed to be on his old club’s side.
The blaming of players is mentioned repeatedly in Spain, almost certainly because of the wedge Mourinho helped create between himself and several in the Real Madrid dressing room.
It may well be something he needs to think about if he wants his Manchester United team to get themselves, and him, out of the mini crisis they’ve quickly ended up in. And whilst he’s thinking about that, he’ll need to give Wayne Rooney a thought or two as well.
