The defence

There was a time when the prevailing attitude to José Mourinho was it might not be pretty but he got the job done. At Real Madrid that began to change. Why was he so obsessed by playing his “trivote”, his block of three holding midfielders, even against lesser sides? But still, the problem was at the front of the team: Mourinho sides did not concede goals. This United did: 29 in 17 league games this season, the fifth-worst record in the league. But the situation is even worse than that. David de Gea is widely considered to have surrendered his crown as the Premier League’s best goalkeeper but he has still made more saves than all but three. In other words, that defensive record could easily be even worse.

The warning signs were there last season, when only four keepers made more saves than De Gea. United may have conceded only 28 goals last season, better than any side other than City, but De Gea’s excellence perhaps masked certain problems. Mourinho, no doubt, would blame the players available, and in the summer made great play of the need for a central defender who never arrived, but then, in 2016 and 2017, he did spend £60m on Eric Bailly and Victor Lindelöf, players who have never entirely convinced.

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Injuries have not helped but neither has Mourinho, whose chopping and changing of personnel and formation served to confuse the issue.

Pressing

Not everybody, of course, has to play the same game. One of football’s beauties is the fact there isn’t a right way to play, that there are multiple interpretations. But when pretty much every other elite side in Europe are capable of playing a ferocious pressing game, it does make Mourinho’s reluctance to press more noticeable. It may be that reactive football, sitting deep, inviting pressure and looking to counter, would anyway be problematic at a club like Manchester United, where the assumption is that the approach will be attacking. But it becomes particularly troublesome when the defending is as poor as it has been this season and results, the great vindicator, no longer justify the approach.

Lack of automations

In Antonio Conte’s first season at Chelsea, Eden Hazard was asked the difference between Conte and his predecessor Mourinho. Conte, he said, worked on “automations”, practising set sequences, gambits to be deployed when the situation allowed. Mourinho eschewed that, believing football too random to be worth preparing set moves. He prepared to develop in his players an understanding of the game such that they would make the right choice (at least as he saw it).

That palpably has not happened and the result is that United in possession often look a little bewildered. Although there have been surges when they have overwhelmed opponents in the final 20 minutes of games even this season, there has rarely been genuine fluency.

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Lack of responsiveness

Against Liverpool on Sunday Mourinho switched from a back three to a back four at half-time, taking off Diogo Dalot, who had looked promising at right wing-back. In his absence, Andy Robertson romped free on that flank. Mourinho even called attention to how well he had played afterwards, praising the Scotland international’s capacity to make a series of high-intensity sprints. And yet at no point did he try to staunch that channel. Was that a deliberate ploy, deciding it was more advantageous to block up the centre even if it meant surrendering the flanks (which would be an astonishing admission of weakness from an United manager)? Or was it simple incapacity, a hope that players, if he really had instilled the right mentality, would be able to work it out? Either way, it did not work.

Sánchez-Lukaku

There have been numerous questionable signings in Mourinho’s time at Manchester United – where is Fred? Has anybody seen him recently? But perhaps none that so summed up the lack of joined-up thinking as the signing of Alexis Sánchez. How was he supposed to work with Romelu Lukaku? Sánchez, for Arsenal and Chile, was at his best operating in the channel between centre-forward and left wing, either going from in to out or out to in. To facilitate that requires a mobile centre-forward, who is comfortable dropping deep. Lukaku is not that. He can start from wide attacking the centre, as he did to some effect for Belgium against Brazil in the World Cup, but the way United have used him is as more orthodox No 9, which means there will never be room for Sánchez to dart into.

The Fellaini protocol

“I can imagine when the result was 2-1 to bring on a fresh Fellaini, I think they would be in big, big trouble,” Mourinho said after his United had lost 3-1 to Manchester City last month. Too often that has been his policy this season: keep the game tight, then toss Marouane Fellaini on and hope his size and aggression force something. It can work, as it did at Juventus, but the fact it has so often been Mourinho’s only discernible strategy speaks volumes. This is Manchester United, the wealthiest club in the world by revenue, and you would hope they had something more sophisticated up their sleeves than chucking the big lad on late doors.