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‘Brainwashing’ needed for United players, says Mourinho

MANCHESTER — There was a fanaticism in the way Louis van Gaal talked frequently about the need to “retrain the brains” of his Manchester United players, except that, to most observers, that rewiring did little more than breed a series of robots adept at passing the ball backwards and sideways and not much else.

Mourinho says neither Wayne Rooney (background) nor Zlatan Ibrahimovic (front), his first-choice strikeforce, is suited to playing on the counter-attack. PHOTO: REUTERS

Mourinho says neither Wayne Rooney (background) nor Zlatan Ibrahimovic (front), his first-choice strikeforce, is suited to playing on the counter-attack. PHOTO: REUTERS

MANCHESTER — There was a fanaticism in the way Louis van Gaal talked frequently about the need to “retrain the brains” of his Manchester United players, except that, to most observers, that rewiring did little more than breed a series of robots adept at passing the ball backwards and sideways and not much else.

Well, after the brainwashing, prepare for the cleansing as Mourinho attempts to unravel the muddle left by Van Gaal.

United’s new manager may have tried to give the impression of a man reluctant to stick the boot into his predecessor but it did not require much reading between the lines to spot the knife being stuck in and slowly twisted.

For a manager about to obliterate the world-transfer record by signing France midfielder Paul Pogba from Juventus for £100  million (S$176 million), sympathy for the hand Mourinho was dealt by Van Gaal will certainly be in short supply.

But the Portuguese clearly fears the time it will take to reprogramme minds could compromise the way his team begin the season.

“We try to improve everything, we use every minute we have to improve the players and especially to improve the principles of how we play as a team, but it is very difficult,” Mourinho said on the eve of United’s Community Shield match against Leicester City last night.

“It would be easier to get 20 new players and start with them from zero than to get a squad that was previously with a top manager but with different ideas than mine.

“It’s difficult to change the way we analyse the defensive organisation, it’s difficult to organise a team in the first phases of the build-up that plays so differently. So we need time.

“If you are a right-back or a left-back and every time you have the ball, you pass to a central defender and you repeat that for two years …”

Mourinho did not need to finish the sentence.

Any United supporter who was numbed watching the endless cycle of sideways and backwards passes last season, and the inevitable dearth of shots, will appreciate the scale of Van Gaal’s indoctrination.

“It is not because I tell the players, ‘Get the ball and look for solutions in between the lines and look for solutions in the space behind’ that they are going to do that (straight away),” he said.

“In training, yes, you stop, you speak, you repeat. In competition, no, the ball arrives to you and you have no time for that. You go for automatic, the instinct, so the dynamic is very difficult.”

Mourinho said the easy option would have been to change little, but clearly he does not like some of what he has inherited.

“For a central defender to mark man-to-man and to chase his opponent even if the opponent goes 15 to 20 metres away from him, I am not saying that is wrong,” he said.

“I am saying it is not my way to do it and so say now that we play zonal, we don’t follow the man, we make the team compact and, in between our positions, we mark the movement of the opponent. It is a completely different profile, it takes time. But I have to change this.”

There was insight, too, into how United are likely to play under him, with Mourinho of the view that neither Wayne Rooney nor Zlatan Ibrahimovic, his first-choice strikeforce, is suited to playing on the counter-attack.

“When I have in my (Chelsea) team Damien Duff and Arjen Robben or when I have in my (Real Madrid) team Ángel Di María and Cristiano Ronaldo, how do you want me to play?” Mourinho said. “If I don’t play a certain way, it is because I don’t want to win.

“I don’t think Rooney and Ibrahimovic are players to play in the counter-attack. We have to be dominant in our game but, again, one thing is to be dominant by trying to have a huge percentage of ball possession.

“Another way to be dominant is to play in the last third and to use the best quality of two strikers like Rooney and Ibrahimovic, so I have to read the situation and adapt to the quality of the players.”

Not that Mourinho, a title winner in his first seasons at Porto, Chelsea and Inter, wants to try to quell expectations. If anything, he intends to raise them.

“It is not new in my career, everywhere I’ve had to cope with that situation,” he said of the immediate pressure to win.

“It doesn’t matter where I am, everyone expects big things. I like to create that expectation. I like the players to feel it.” THE DAILY TELEGRAPH

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