Of Wenger, Mourinho, and Özil: a contrast in styles

Arsene Wenger and Jose Mourinho have contrasting styles to their management (Getty Images)

Now that we’ve advanced in the League Cup, we’ll face Chelsea in round four at the end of October, as well as in late December in the Premier League.

Of course, most of the news out of Stamford Bridge centers around the conflict between José Mourinho and Juan Mata, a carry-over of a recent trend that has seen the manager run down players at each club he’s managed, whether it’s Mata at Chelsea, Iker Casillas at Real Madrid, or Mario Balotelli at Inter Milan.

It seems almost to be a calling-card or a running joke: how do you know that Mourinho has managed a team? One of its best or brightest has been ground down into the dust.

Of course, for those players whom he favors, the sun couldn’t shine brighter and the birds couldn’t sing sweeter. That’s all well and good for those favoured few, and perhaps its a useful motivational lever on the rest of the squad.

However, the contrast between Mourinho and Wenger couldn’t be more stark, as Mourinho has developed a reputation for a certain nomadism and penchant for undermining players to prove a point while Wenger has, for better or worse, stood apart for his longevity and for his ability to support and develop players into superstars.

Setting aside my own personal, sentimental reasons, I really do hope that we deliver at least three spankings to Mourinho, if not just to progress in the League Cup or get farther away at the top of the Premier League table, but to send a message. That message?

One can and should build success on a foundation of building players up, not on tearing them down. I’ll admit that I have a soft spot for Casillas, and this might bias me a bit against Mourinho. Casillas is easily on the short-list for the world’s best keepers, and he seems, by all accounts, to be a class act as well.

To see how his career withered on the vine under Mourinho is therefore an issue for me. For as well as Diego López has done, the fact that he’s benefited from the submarining (sub-mourinho-ing? too much?) of Casillas’s career is too much for me to stomach.

To then see the same happen to Juan Mata, who I’ve heard, turns in a tolerably decent shift from time to time, is more than a bit aggravating.

Yes, I know that we could’ve had him a few years back and were even linked to him over the past summer, but that’s not what I’m going on about at the moment. Long story short, I can’t stand a manager who will undermine a player to prove a point. The lame excuse for Mata’s dilemma is that his abilities don’t suit Mourinho’s preferred tactics. When you have a player of Mata’s qualities, why not just explain those tactics and ask him to play to those tactics?