Month: March 2018

Jose Mourinho is no longer The Special One. He is The Dull One

One thing that must be acknowledged is the Jose Mourinho we all knew and some fell in love with is gone.

The slick, arrogant, hungry young manager is long gone and is now a completely different animal. He is now a negative, dull, tired old shell of his former self.

The tipping point seems to be the Chelsea league win a few years ago. Even when he came back to Chelsea he looked tired and dull in his opening press conference.

He won the league in his 2nd season back so no one seemed to make much of this difference in persona. With this achievement, he seemed to be completely contempt and any remaining hunger left him completely.

An unbelievable relegation battle followed and inevitable sacking. He got the Man Utd job off reputation alone and in his first season finished outside the top 4.

This was covered up by the Europa League and League Cup triumphs which are not major trophies. Not in Man Utd’s world anyway.

He has been given an unreal amount of money to spend on players who at this stage have got his team results despite his overly negative and defensive tactics.

This Sevilla two-legged performances and results are showing his lack of quality as a manager. The 2nd leg last night was absolutely diabolical. Truly awful.

The team were suffocated through fear of losing an away goal. This comes from him. Nobody else. If you let the players go out by themselves, they would look to smash Sevilla.

To put this result into perspective, Leicester City beat this Sevilla team 2-0 this time last year to dump them out. This £400m Man Utd team never looked liked doing the same.

Being 2nd in the league this season is no achievement when you consider the money spent and being 16 points behind Man City without any realistic title challenge.

Jose Mourinho should be developing into a different type of manager at this stage. He is older but is he any wiser? Perhaps he is a different type of manager…an average one. A dull one.

So maybe that’s just it. The Special One has become The Dull One.

@ToonBano

 

Mitro is on fire and he is making Rafa look ridiculous

Just a word on the Mitrovic situation.

Mitro has not been given one league start all season. The one game he did start was in the League cup and scored. He mugged off Joe Hart in a Premier League game whilst scoring, elbowed someone and seemed shunned for it.

On fire

His (basically) replacement Joselu has been nothing short of terrible in front of goal this season. He had a 7 game spell where he started each game but scored in none of them. Yet Mitro was not brought in to end this nonsense.

Joselu has only 4 goals to his name in 20 appearances. One of those goals was the ridiculous ricochet against Liverpool and two were open goals. Mitro was only two goals behind despite no starts and a handful of appearances which were mainly 10 to 20-minute spell at the end of games.

Mitrovic has gone to Fulham on loan and has already bagged 5 in 4 games. He is actually Newcastle Utd’s top scorer with 7 goals…

Sheff Utd boss said the following after he tore their defence apart, “Mitro is too good for the Championship and should be playing for Newcastle. He is a £15m Premier League striker who is going to the World Cup.”

Whereas Joselu hasn’t started any of Newcastle’s last four games or had many minutes off the bench since ironically the 31st January, deadline day, where he missed a penalty and missed a massive chance against Burnley to seal all three points. We ended up dropping two points that day.

Rafa Benitez may be a lot of things. He may have a lot of trophies. But if Newcastle Utd are relegated this season by a point or two, than Rafa Benitez will be 100% responsible. 100%.

I want to make it this perfectly clear so everyone understands this.

It won’t be Ashley’s fault. It won’t be Lee Charnley. It won’t be Amanda Staveley. It will be Rafa’s. Ashley gave Rafa a shorthand this season, no doubt about it. Rafa moaned every week at the lack of quality to choose from and rightly so.

Useless

However, he has refused to select arguably our best all-round striker for the entire campaign, who no doubt would have scored and created more goals than Joselu and would have put more points on the board to have kept this club up.

Make no mistake about it. Don’t be confused. This is pretty much a cast iron fact

when you look at the young Serbian tearing up the Championship and dragging his country to the World Cup.

Rafa Benitez hasn’t properly explained his decision as to why he has made our clubs job a whole lot harder in trying to stay in this league. Quotes of ‘not working hard enough in training’ or ‘he doesn’t fit tactically’ are weak explanations to say the least.

Especially when you consider just how dire Joselu was and still is with his

supposed extra ability to run more in training and tactical efficiency. Plus speaking of tactics, I could go on about how Rafa’s over cautious approach in home games has also cost us this season but that’s for another day.

Bye and good luck

If we go down. Rafa will walk off into the sunset to a top job and restart a project for himself somewhere else, whereas it will be the Newcastle fans who are left to pick up and deal with the unimaginable sh**house he left behind.

Explaining himself isn’t even the start of it.

Mitro’s on fire and Newcastle don’t have a pot to p**s in. Work that one out. And people say beggars can’t be choosers.