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Jose Mourinho is finished.

Mourinho is yesterday's man. Mourinho looks sour and glum. Mourinho looks weary and despondent. Mourinho is angry and out of control. Mourinho has lost his mojo. Mourinho is nothing but a chequebook manager who no longer knows how to buy properly.

Mourinho has been superseded by a new generation of genius coaches.

You'll know the names, as there's plenty of them. Antonio Conte, Jurgen Klopp, Pep Guardiola, Mauricio Pochettino. Twelve rounds into a 38-game Premier League season each has already had at least one turn being lauded as the champion-manager-elect.

Conte was supposedly on the verge of breaking the land-speed record for a Roman Abramovich sacking, but then got tough on his players and switched to a five-man defence to win six League matches in a row. He's now top of the table and current flavour of the week in the 'why Mourinho's past it' camp.

(Image: Getty) (Image: Liverpool FC/Getty Images)

Klopp, another manager unencumbered with European football, was the previous poster boy. Feted for their touchline dynamism and upbeat demeanour, the vigour of Klopp and Conte supposedly highlight all that has gone wrong with morose Mourinho.

Guardiola started his first season in England with 10 straight wins, converting the expectation that he would win the Premier League with Manchester City into heady discussion as to whether he would do so without a single defeat. Since then he's won three in 11 and exited the League Cup to Mourinho's Manchester United, yet his is a path to progress, his rival's a funeral cortège.

(Image: Getty Images) (Image: Man Utd via Getty)

Pochettino's unbeaten start saw him cast as Guardiola's strongest rival for the title. Though Tottenham remain undefeated in the League, as many fixtures have been drawn as won, the Argentine's Champions League campaign has been reduced to a Europa League play-off against CSKA Moscow, and he's already departed the League Cup.

All four new generation coaches have another thing in common. Not one of them has won a Premier League title. By the end of this season at least three of them still won't have won one.

Only Conte and Guardiola can match Mourinho's achievement in winning that title at the very first attempt. It is an interesting argument as to whether any of the four musketeers will eventually emulate Mourinho's standing tally of three Premier League titles (from five complete campaigns), never mind whatever number the 53-year-old eventually extends that to.

Should Conte take more or less the same group of players that Mourinho led at Chelsea last year and pair a domestic cup with a League title won with three games to spare he will merely have matched his predecessor's last great achievement at Stamford Bridge. (And even then Conte will have done it stripped of the demands of simultaneously competing in Champions League and with a heavier net transfer spend.)

(Image: Shaun Botterill)

Little wonder then that Mourinho complains about critics who portray him as a spent force. "Should we be respected even in periods when our results are not that best?” he asked ahead of last weekend's League meeting with Arsene Wenger. “I think Mr Wenger gets that. I don't think I do. Even though my last Premier League title was 18 months ago. No respect."

Twenty-four hours later, after his Manchester United dominated an encounter which was supposed to have underlined the nature of his demise, Mourinho returned to that theme of disrespect: “I said it at the press conference yesterday. The Arsenal manager hasn’t won a championship in 14 years; I haven’t won a championship in 18 months. He, in 14 years, failed to build a team to be champion; I’ve been here for four months. And the demand is only for me and not for others.”

It is as though Mourinho's critics have forgotten the outcomes of the three Manchester United campaigns since Sir Alex Ferguson retired as manager, finishing seventh, fourth and fifth in the Premier League, 22, 17 and 15 points adrift of the winners. It is as though Mourinho was expected to immediately repair six transfer windows of profligate, horribly judged player trading, immediately returning the club to the summit of what is generally regarded as the most competitive Premier League ever staged.

It is no coincidence that during the long months in which United's owners deliberated upon Louis van Gaal's sacking and succession both Guardiola and Pochettino were approached about taking on the job, and both preferred positions elsewhere. Guardiola because Manchester City's squad was stronger, he had the promise of complete boardroom backing, and he considered the challenge less demanding. Pochettino because he fretted he wasn't yet ready for a club of United's dimensions and degree of external attention.

(Image: John Peters)

Perhaps the argument lies in pairing United's peripatetic start to this Premier League campaign with Chelsea's travails in Mourinho's last one at Stamford Bridge. We all know that no Premier League champions have ever suffered such a vertiginous descent in fortunes as that.

Yet there are Leicester City, 12 games into their first title defence and two points off the relegation zone.

Perspective. If Jose Mourinho wasn't finished, yesterday's man, sour, glum, weary, despondent, angry, out of control, dependent on a chequebook, and surpassed by all around him, perhaps this one of just two Premier League managers still competing for four trophies (the other isn't Conte, Klopp, Guardiola or Pochettino) might benefit from some.