This season Jose Mourinho has certainly been okay with taking a swipe or two at his last previous club, Manchester United, so he should have fully expected some kind of response. Current United manager Ole Gunnar Solskjaer has now returned fire, as he pointed out the mess he inherited from the special one.
“I felt a lot needed to be changed,” Solskjaer said ahead of this weekend’s now cancelled Premier League fixtures (the league has suspended play until April 3 due to fears of coronavirus spread).
“I believe that we’re going places. I believe that we’re on the track that Man United need to be on.”
“There are different cultures at different clubs and different ways of doing things and believe in the way we do things at Man United now.
“I don’t necessarily believe in everything we’ve done before but at the moment I believe in what we’re doing.”
What the Norwegian did was make an overt, yet professional and calm public criticism of what was in place when he got the gig. It’s a direct critique of the work Mourinho did, but pretty high road when compared to what Mourinho has said this season. The Portugese has, on one occasion, gone out of his way to say that United are/were not part of the race for the top four.
He also openly took shots at the club’s stalling and bumbling of the Bruno Fernandes acquisition until the end of the January transfer window.
In the time that has elapsed since Mourinho made those remarks, what has transpired only makes the former boss look foolish. United are very much in the top four race now, and that’s largely due to Bruno Fernandes, who has been that x-factor they badly needed.
Paul M. Banks runs The Sports Bank.net, which is partnered with News Now. Banks, the author of “No, I Can’t Get You Free Tickets: Lessons Learned From a Life in the Sports Media Industry,” regularly appears on WGN CLTV and co-hosts the “Let’s Get Weird, Sports” podcast on SB Nation.
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