Jose Mourinho easily proven wrong after his Arsenal and Mikel Arteta 'magic strategy' dig

Jose Mourinho is not a manager who will keep his thoughts to himself, with the former Chelsea and Tottenham boss causing headlines with an interview this week.

The Portuguese manager has been out of work since leaving Roma at the start of the year and is still on the lookout for a new role. He sat down with the Telegraph this week, where the topic of style of play was brought up, it led to talk on Arsenal’s performance against Man City just a few weeks ago.

In what was a crunch game in the race for the Premier League title, Mikel Arteta made the decision for his team to play a more defensive style for the game. It was successful with the match ending in a 0-0 draw.

"I am happy because I like the kid [Arteta]. And I am happy everything goes for him. But the way they [Arsenal] played to get that point - and the way the media spoke about a magic strategy,” Mourinho said on the game.

"In my time, it was not a magic strategy, and I won at Manchester City a few times. But it was not an amazing strategy. It was a defensive game. Park the bus. Park the double bus. It was a different perspective."

Mourinho is well known for taking a defensive approach to games throughout his managerial career, but to compare his style with the decision that Arteta made for one game is not right.

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This season Arsenal are the top goalscorers, having netted 77 times throughout the campaign, one more than Manchester City and two more than Liverpool. Throughout the season they have shown that they can play attacking and expansive football.

Isn’t one of the signs of a good team having the ability to adapt to certain situations? In the case against Manchester City, that is the way that Arteta thought would be the best to get what could be a crucial result at the end of the season, and it did exactly that.

Generally for Mourinho’s teams, taking a more defensive approach is the plan for the majority of games throughout the campaign, that is not what Arsenal have done, so it’s unfair to compare the two situations.

Arteta has been widely praised for the job he has done at Emirates Stadium and the attacking football he has his team playing. Throughout the last two seasons, it has mostly brought results too which is win-win, but the team were criticised for a collapse at the end of last season which saw them fall behind in the title race.

The game against Man City came in the part of the season where results are more important than performances. Taking the approach he did shows that he learned from last season and he should be praised for that, Arsenal need to become winners, and isn’t that worth the sacrifice of attacking football for one or maybe two games a season?

The opposite problem seems to appear for Mourinho, the reason he was sacked by Chelsea was not due to a lack of trophies, he’s won silverware almost everywhere he has been (excluding Tottenham), but it’s the style of play that was the problem, it’s why Roman Abromovic dismissed him the first time, while both results and performances were the problem the second time around.

While the ‘magic strategy’ isn’t everyone’s preferred style in big games, when used at the right times to produce needed results then it should be praised. It only becomes a problem if that style becomes the norm throughout the season.