Mourinho was not a happy bunny.
Manchester United do not like away matches against promoted teams. Having already lost on visits to Huddersfield and Newcastle this season, United fell to a 1-0 defeat at Brighton on Friday night.
Pascal Gross’ second-half goal was enough for the Seagulls to clinch three precious points and leave Jose Mourinho bristling with rage.
With Romelu Lukaku and Alexis Sanchez not featuring, it was a chance for the likes of Anthony Martial and Marcus Rashford to prove a point in attack. Instead, they fell to what Gary Neville called a ‘shocker.’ Along with other fringe members of Mourinho’s squad – Marouane Fellaini, Matteo Darmian and Marcos Rojo – Martial and Rashford failed to shine, leaving David De Gea as the only United player to leave the Amex Stadium with his head held high.
Speaking on Sky Sports, Neville offered a typically frank and unabashed assessment of United’s failings.
“He said it was important to him to get the four points to finish second – when you can’t the message to your players as a manager, the manager has to go, or the players have to go,” he told Sky Sports.
“At this moment in time, Manchester United aren’t getting rid of Jose Mourinho. He doesn’t like some of those players. He’s had enough of them and they’re going to go. They were terrible tonight. It’s not good enough. They’re wearing a Manchester United shirt; the standards have to be higher than that.
“He’s going to make big changes. It was so bad.”
They were raging with himhttps://t.co/6NBgE00uMY
— SportsJOE (@SportsJOEdotie) May 5, 2018
Neville is right. A lot of these players were already on the periphery and, with a performance as meagre and listless as that, Mourinho won’t have received the right message. Did it really look like those players were fighting for their places in the squad? Far from it and it won’t at all be surprising if Friday night turns out to be the last game in a United shirt for a few of those players.
In a late-season exercise of squad rotation, Mourinho made six changes from the team that beat Arsenal last Sunday with Fellaini (the matchwinner against the Gunners), Rashford, Martial, Rojo and Darmian all given the chance to stake a claim for a starting spot in the FA Cup final against Chelsea in a few weeks’ time.
Darmian, Fellaini and Rojo all failed to last the 90 minutes as Mourinho watched on from his technical area, a grim expression etched across his face.
In his post-match interview, Mourinho struggled to conceal his dissatisfaction.
“It was not good enough,” said Mourinho. “The players who replaced others did not perform at a good level and, when individuals do that, it is difficult for the team to play well.
“Maybe now you will not ask me why A, B and C do not play so much. People always ask: ‘Why always Lukaku?’ Well, now they know why always Lukaku, and why always this player and why always that player. We are probably not as good as people think we are individually.
“I knew what was going to happen, and I told them, but that is what we got. Brighton had one target, to get the point and celebrate their Premier League survival. Our target was to get points to help us finish second and they clearly showed that, for them, it is more important for them to stay in the Premier League than for us to finish second. They showed it from the first minute and we didn’t show that. We were not able to motivate ourselves.”
