We know it was the 31st trophy of his career because he told us it was. Zlatan Ibrahimovic‘s late goal to secure Manchester United a 2-1 victory over Leicester City in Sunday’s Community Shield informed us about him as player, but more can be gleaned from his words in the immediate aftermath, however sparse, about him as a man.
It was a surprise to see him sweat at full-time. One would have suspected Ibrahimovic makes the sun perspire rather than the other way around. Sure enough, though, after a sapping shift on a sultry afternoon in the capital, he looked sweaty and knackered.
Yet still, when posed with a fairly anodyne question from BT Sport’s pitch-side reporter on what it was like to score a winning goal at Wembley, he was able to summon key numbers with the ease of a parent asked a child’s date of birth.
“First official game, we play for the trophy and we win. That’s what it’s all about, winning trophies,” he told BT Sport (h/t BBC Sport).
“This is my 31st trophy, collective trophy, and I’m super happy. This is why I came.”
It’s usually the other way around. An interviewer will throw an arbitrary statistic at a player to be greeted with a vacant look. Ibrahimovic is different. These numbers are as much a part of him as his ponytail or tattoos, and that’s no bad thing.
As a trophy specialist, he’s been brought into a club that has got out of the habit of picking up silverware as routine. Sunday is a start.
The pause, then correction, from “my” to “collective,” was almost sweet, uncharacteristically bashful certainly. Clever, too, as failure to demonstrate a sense of community on Sunday, when competing for its shield no less, would only have fuelled those who have quibbled there may be no “I” in team, but there are three in Ibrahimovic.
In possession of a striking physical presence, when coupled with an unapologetic showmanship mixed with devilment, Ibrahimovic—a fighter and bicycle thief in his youth—could be a character stepping on to the field straight off the pages of an Ernest Hemingway novel.
The 34-year-old has the strength of a bull and the technique of a matador. He employed the former to brush off Wes Morgan in the penalty area, and then the latter to cushion a header beyond Kasper Schmeichel for an 83rd-minute winner.
Rory Smith’s forensically detailed account of the subtle changes Jose Mourinho has indoctrinated in the early weeks of his Old Trafford tenure, published in Saturday’s edition of the Times, claims United’s players have been surprised to find the Portuguese in a “light-hearted, approachable mood,” as he attempts to, “inculcate a family atmosphere” at the club. Juan Mata and Bastian Schweinsteiger were unavailable for comment.
In contrast, Ibrahimovic is a self-confessed fanboy of his manager. He claimed in his memoir I Am Zlatan Ibrahimovic that he “would kill for Mourinho“, which if nothing else should give Arsene Wenger and Pep Guardiola a few sleepless nights.
He’s probably joking. In the same way Joe Pesci’s character Tommy in Goodfellas is only fooling around when he asks the kid Spider to dance. And then shoots him in the foot.
Ibrahimovic may be polite for now, but it won’t be long before he reveals what he’s really after. Marco Materazzi, no shrinking violet himself, said of his former Inter Milan team-mate, per the Guardian: “He wants to win all the time and simply doesn’t let others make mistakes. He insults his team-mates a lot.”
On a one-year deal at United, and turning 35 in October, Ibrahimovic wants a 14th league title in 16 seasons (although the two he won for Juventus in 2005 and 2006 were subsequently scrubbed from the records due to the Calciopoli scandal). He wants to prove the 50 goals he scored for Paris Saint-Germain (he scored 156 in 180 games in total) last season were not the haul of a flat-track bully. He wants to emulate what he did the last time he worked with Mourinho, when he scored 29 in all competitions as Inter Milan won a 17th Scudetto. He wants to score in the Manchester derby and flick the bird at Guardiola. He wants his swansong to be a fitting sign-off to the most decorated of careers. He wants the moon on a stick, and he might just get it.
United may have got him for nothing, but there’s a reason Ajax, Juventus, Inter Milan, Barcelona, AC Milan and PSG have spent nigh on £150 million in acquiring his services over the years.
In truth, for much of Sunday’s game Ibrahimovic was an island. Isolated. A backheel with his first touch in the opening minute was a flirty look across a crowded room, but thereafter it was fairly soporific stuff from the Premier League’s newest star. One part avant-garde, two parts alpha male, he looked a yard off his sharpest.
For all Mourinho‘s warnings over the summer about Wayne Rooney being, “a 9, a 10, a nine-and-a-half but not a 6, not even an 8,” per Alan Smith of the Guardian, his captain spent much of the afternoon slovenly prompting from deep.
Rooney and Ibrahimovic have dovetailed nicely in pre-season; at Wembley they were strangers on a train making nothing more than polite conversation. Like knees touching under a shared carriage table, too often they occupied one another’s space.
Neither Morgan nor Robert Huth enjoy pushing up into the areas Ibrahimovic was wandering into, but it effectively meant United often had 11 men behind the ball against a side always happy to sit deep themselves, to ensure no space is left in behind on the counter.
Mourinho‘s pre-match words about his new Rooney-Ibrahimovic attacking axis proved prescient, per Paul Wilson of the Observer: “I don’t think those two are suited to a counterattacking style, so we will have to think of something else.” It still needs thinking about.
Just before half-time, typically industrious work on the edge of his own area saw Rooney dispossess Riyad Mahrez. No more than 20 yards from him, Ibrahimovic had dropped deep, too. On the halfway line, a sea of blue shirts waited to toss back hopeful balls as a tide returns driftwood. When Mourinho speaks of dominating the last third of the pitch, one suspects he doesn‘t mean the third closest to David De Gea’s goal.
In the first half, Ibrahimovic had 16 touches, the fewest of any outfield Manchester United player. Leicester goalkeeper Schmeichel, hardly inundated with shots to deal with, had 22.
After the interval when frustration got the better of him, Ibrahimovic did as Rooney does, in spending more time running toward his own goal than the opposition’s. Often for PSG last season in the UEFA Champions League when chances were scarcer, he adopted an “if the mountain won’t come to Muhammad, then Muhammad must go to the mountain” mantra, and attempted to create them himself. It was the same at Wembley.
His performance was quiet then, up until his moment. And that’s why Manchester United have signed him—for his moments. No one in the modern game, with perhaps the exception of Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo, has had more.
The most consistent goalscorer in Europe over the past decade imbues a sense of theatre in anything he does. It’s what Manchester United have so badly lacked since Sir Alex Ferguson retired in May 2013. He radiates an intoxicating magnetism that someone makes his sense of timing seem preordained.
He’d shrug if asked to explain it and say that’s what gods do.
A lack of presence stationed between the width of the opposition goal was an Achilles heel that repeatedly flared for United last season. Ibrahimovic‘s headed winner off the impressively buccaneering Antonio Valencia’s hanging, stood-up cross from the right flank belonged to a bygone era: a classic centre-forward’s goal.
Many had thought Valencia would be a collateral victim of Mourinho‘s ongoing cull. His assist, though, follows on from three he conjured against Galatasaray, and for now he appears to have supplanted Matteo Darmian and Anthony Fosu-Mensah as his manager’s first-choice right-back. Both were omitted from Sunday’s matchday squad, along with Phil Jones, Ashley Young, Memphis Depay, and the still shy of fitness Chris Smalling.
Mata would probably add his name to the list above in terms of long-term prospects. A gregarious a player as there is the Premier League, he deserves more than the ignobility of being substituted just 29 minutes after coming on as a substitute.
Mourinho said post-match there was no issue, per The Independent, and Mata had understood his decision. The midfielder’s face, a sorry mix of hurt, incredulity and anger, was a melancholic echo of his final days at Chelsea when Mourinho sanctioned his departure.
Mourinho is not the only one capable of demonstrating prescience. In an interview with the Times‘ Matt Hughes in October 2015, Mata spoke of Mourinho‘s decision to sell him despite being voted Chelsea’s Player of the Year the previous season: “If a luxury player is a player who scores and assists and has good stats, then I’m happy to be a luxury player.
“When you lose a certain kind of player—the creative players—always get the blame.”
The Spaniard is too good to have his talent deflated like a slow puncture, and probably too nice to ever make it work with Mourinho. Sometimes it’s better to quit your losses and move on.
If Mourinho is staunch in his stance about Rooney not being used as a central midfielder, having runners willing to go beyond him and Ibrahimovic will be paramount in avoiding the prosaic pedestrianism of the Louis van Gaal years.
Jesse Lingard, Anthony Martial, Marcus Rashford and Henrikh Mkhitaryan are all capable of running beyond a No. 9; Mourinho’s conundrum is which combinations work best. The orchestra you can hear in the background is the rest of the Premier League managers playing a collection of the world’s smallest violins.
The imminent arrival of Paul Pogba will add another Galactico presence to United’s ranks, and more importantly, an imposing driving force in the centre of the field.
Mourinho is overstocked with midfielders. The majority, for want of a better word, are perhaps best described as polite. Pogba‘s arrival is like slapping a Ferrari on the forecourt of a Volvo dealership.
Sunday’s game perfectly illustrated the importance of pace.
Lingard‘s sparkling injection of it broke the deadlock just past the half-hour mark, Jamie Vardy‘s surfeit of it helped him snaffle up a well-taken equaliser after Marouane Fellaini‘s catastrophic back pass, while Leicester were a side transformed after the interval with the double introduction of speed kings Ahmed Musa and Demarai Gray.
Lingard, 23, has developed a liking for the big occasion, with the Mancunian’s majestic winning goal in May’s FA Cup final against Crystal Palace the reason United were back at Wembley. His effort on Sunday was equally spectacular.
Cute anticipation and a dropped shoulder just past halfway left Andy King chewing turf, as sparking jet heels saw him first slalom past Huth, and then Morgan’s kamikaze sliding challenge (all afternoon Leicester’s captain played as though he’d been on the Morgan’s Rum his face now adorns), before Danny Simpson was brushed aside to allow Lingard to calmly slot past Schmeichel.
There will not have been a single Leicester supporter inside Wembley who won’t have wistfully thought of N’Golo Kante. Nampalys Mendy’s assured performance as a second-half substitute is reason for cautious cheer though.
The Frenchman did a passable impersonation of his compatriot, but Ranieri is pragmatic enough to accept Kante is essentially irreplaceable, per the Telegraph: “There will be a big difference. If Chelsea bought Kante, it’s because he played as two players last season.
“The referee counted 11 (on our team) but we were 12.”
If the signing of Musa was former head of recruitment and assistant manager Steve Walsh’s departing gift to Leicester before moving to Everton over the summer, he can leave the champions with his head held high. In the space of a week, Musa has run Barcelona and Manchester United ragged.
It could be a big season for Gray, too. In the aforementioned pair—along with Vardy and Mahrez—Ranieri has an attacking quartet that would be in with a medal shout for the 4×100-metre relay were they eligible for Rio 2016.
There was nothing in a typically dogged performance, interspersed with occasion electric moments provided by Vardy, Mahrez, Gray and in particular Musa, to suggest this season will prove to be the morning after the night season before for Leicester.
The bookies giving shorter odds on Leicester to be relegated than to retain the title seem uncharitable in the extreme. Leicester will be fine, better than fine in fact.
To end then, a question for the agent provocateur. What odds Ibrahimovic adding a Premier League title to his long list of honours?
A 393rd goal in 678 senior appearances for the Swede gave Mourinho his first silverware as Manchester United manager.
One suspects a Community Shield won’t sate either’s voracious appetite, even if strictly speaking it now means Ibrahimovic has won trophies in five different countries: the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, France and England.
Think of Sunday then more as a palate cleanser, ahead of nine months of hearty Premier League fare.
With Zlatan and Jose in tandem, it’s not going to be dull.
All stats courtesy of WhoScored.com unless otherwise stated.
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