The first half was a chess match played at knife-point. Mourinho had clearly spent the week studying the 3-0 identifying where United had been exposed, where the press had suffocated them, where the spaces had opened.
He set Matic and Herrera on Rodríguez with explicit, man-marking instructions. He played a deep back four, refusing to push up the way they had last season.
He was pragmatic, disciplined, and he was right; the approach neutralised our biggest creative threat. Rodríguez spent forty-five minutes looking for space that didn't exist, his usually balletic movement constrained by two bodies that followed him everywhere like shadows.
But Mourinho's caution had a cost. By sitting deep, he gave Neves time on the ball in areas where the Portuguese playmaker was lethal. Neves sprayed passes left, right, diagonal, through probing for the gap, patient and composed, the metronome ticking steadily while seventy-five thousand people screamed for blood.
