Normally I'm the sort of fan who values results over performance. No matter how you get those results, that is what's most important and a good performance comes secondary as an added bonus.
I've never understood when fans call into radio phone-ins or bitch and moan on social media about boring football, especially when their team's doing relatively well because being entertained comes after the whole point of playing the game in the first place.
The aim of football is to win. At any cost. No matter how you do it, winning is the most important thing. But when you're not winning, and the football is as drab and dreary as United's has been recently, I can start to see where those fans are coming from.
I sat there watching the Valencia game last night bored out of my skull because we never looked like we were going to get out of first gear. Every player's performance was at least 20 to 30% off where it should be, the build up was sploddy and lethargic, no one's making the runs, no one's linking play and there's so little movement among the front three or four players it's unbelievable. Everyone is just static, waiting for someone else to do something and we look a boring side with no ideas and no confidence.
And I start to ask, why is that? Why are we so bereft of ideas? It looks to me like we have too many players that don't fit into the same system, who could be good in the correct systems individually, but when playing together in this team it doesn't seem to work.
A good example of that would be Lukaku. The guy is your archetypal big number 9; he cannot play football with his feet, he's terrible at dribbling, he has no ability to beat a man, but he's fast and he's powerful and his main asset is his strength in the air. When you knowingly buy a player like that you can't then try to play nice futbol into his feet and use him as a link forward. The way we need to play to get the best out of him is to play with two wingers who'll get the ball out of their feet and whip balls into the box for him. Even more so when you have Fellaini in the team, as that seems to be something Mourinho is persisting with at the moment. Sadly he's become one of his most trusted and most used players which is just ridiculous for a club like this.
More often than not we have wingers playing as full-backs. Valencia and Young are not full-backs but they been converted into that because Mourinho and managers before him don't trust any of the full-backs that we do have at the club. Valencia is even club captain. This can only be because he's been at the club the longest amount of time, and we all know Pogba isn't going to be captain anymore. The lack of real leaders at the club is another worrying factor. If you look back 10 years we had van der Sar, Neville, Ferdinand, Vidic, Evra, Giggs, Rooney. All players who were willing to take responsibility and lead both on and off the pitch.
The other main reason I think we're playing badly is because the defence is just so shaky and unreliable. None of our centre-backs would get into any other top 4 or 5 side, and because they're so bad and susceptible to mistakes it makes the rest of the team play with a fear and with the shackles on because they feel like they need to give some sort of protection to the defence. That therefore limits how much we can do going forward, if everyone is starting from such a such a deep position we can't really play through the thirds cos we're all in our own third at the same time.
Admittedly, Smalling and Jones have been at the club for 7 or 8 years now, but even the centre-backs Mourinho has brought in himself he doesn't seem to trust. Lindelof looks so far out of his depth it's not true and Bailly's so prone to a mistake. So more often than not he ends up deferring back to Smalling who - as has been widely advertised - can't play out from the back so there's no point in just trying to play that way.
I'm not even sure what kind of football we are trying to play. That's part of the problem. In days gone by you always knew what you were going to get with United. We were always going to try and score more goals than you. Sometimes we'd let in 2 or 3 but there would always be that sense when you're watching the game that a goal is coming. Even if you were 2-0 down with 10 minutes to go, you'd still be watching with anticipation that something can and most likely will happen, and more often than not I did. Last night I could see from 10 minutes in that we weren't going to produce anything and that's such a mindset change from the Fergie days. It's really difficult to watch.
For the past two years I've backed Mourinho because although the football has never been good, he has improved our fortunes. We've climbed the league from where we were when he took over. We look harder to beat. We even won a couple of trophies, but we seem to be slipping into the Mourinho third year nightmare that he seems to get at every Club. There only looks like one conclusion and I feel like it's going to happen fairly soon.
I go through the squad and I can't think of more than a couple of players that would get into great United sides of the past. The goalkeeper is a definite and he walks into any club team in the world. I really like rashford, he's young, got a lot of potential, he's got no fear, he tries to make things happen. The same can be said of Lingard who's always energetic, always trying to win the ball back high up, trying to make things happen. But I'm not sure who else I'm actually really bothered about in this squad right now. It's a weird thing to think that only really three of the players I would keep if I could build a new squad.
That's a strange thing to say when the squad contains players like Paul Pogba, Nemanja Matic, Anthony Martial and Alexis Sanchez. I was really excited when we signed Sanchez last year but there hasn't been one game so far when he's looked like the guy who used to play for Arsenal. The guy who used to boss games, run games, create goals, score goals, win games all on his own. He looks so far from that player it's unbelievable and even last night when he got substituted there were cheers from the crowd, which tells you the whole story. 70-odd minutes on the clock, his number comes up and he's trudging slowly off. Get off the pitch! Let us make the change so we can try and win this match!
Sanchez is a strange one because I'm not sure if the player is in a terrible run a form or if the system just doesn't allow him to do what he wants to do. At Arsenal I think he pretty much had free reign to go and do whatever he wanted, but Mourinho wants him to be much more rigidly stuck to a position and to do defensive duties, which he can't do as was shown last night. When he was on the right hand side in the first half Valencia got in down that side left time after time and if they had anything about them in the final third we could have been out of the game by half-time.
It's not working at the moment and the biggest depiction of all the problems at the club is this ongoing feud between Pogba and Mourinho. They want to keep getting one over on each other, doing silly little gestures to the camera, making snide little remarks in interviews, do stupid things on social media to get one over on the other. This is one of your most influential players in the squad and your manager; they should be the strongest unit in the club, the two of these guys should be always on the same page, always pushing in the same direction, wanting to do the same the best thing for the good of the club. But it looks like all they want to do is drive a wedge between themselves at every opportunity.
So something's going to give eventually. Either Pogba is going to leave or the manager will leave, and considering how much we paid for the player and the potential he has shown in certain games - more often than not for France than for Man United - it would cost the club so much more to lose the player then it would to lose the manager. If you lose the player you're probably also going to lose the trust and commitment from a lot of other players in the squad because they will stick together. Especially when you got such a tight-knit group of mates like Rashford, Lingard, Pogba and Lukaku. These guys all get on well and you can be sure that they would take each other's side over the manager, if not publicly then definitely behind closed doors
When the manager joined us I was quite pleased because of his proven track record of success and he was the biggest name available to us at the time. He had always coveted the United job too. Up until this summer I thought it was going in the right direction. As I mentioned earlier we weren't playing the greatest football in the world but we were moving up the league. Ok we were a long way away from city in terms of points, but we were comfortably second. Now though, he seems to be acting like a child at every opportunity.
Mourinho always digs out the players in the press and then when he's questioned by journalists about bad performances or bad results he turns things back onto his own track record and what he's won in the past. Just the other day he was quick to remind the players that nobody's bigger than the club and said as much in the programme notes for the Valencia game, but in actual fact all he seems to want to do is remind everyone what he's done in the past and that the most important thing in all of this is Jose Mourinho's reputation. He's not bigger than the club. The club will go on without him and hopefully that's what happens soon.
So unfortunately I've come round to the fact that it might be time for Jose to go. We need a manager who is going to come in and attack teams, bring some flair back, let the shackles off, let the players go and express themselves without the fear of repercussions or a public battering.
This is meant to be Manchester United. Right now it doesn't feel like it.