Mourinho sacked: The game that showed Jose was yesterday's man wasn't Liverpool - it was long before that

The Portuguese demonstrated he had become an anachronism back in February, no longer fit for the top table of European football

As the world pores over the months leading up to the end of José Mourinho’s Manchester United tenure, different people will pinpoint their own distinct moments of when it became apparent that it wasn’t going to work out. The training ground snub of Paul Pogba. The belligerent swears into the camera in Portuguese, which he somehow got away with. The smashed drinks container.

Let us save you the bother. If we go back to February, when United went to Sevilla in the last 16 of the Champions League, they produced a performance that might have been a strain of vintage in their coach’s mind, but it was horribly old-fashioned in reality.

Against a team led by the doomed Vincenzo Montella, who had suffered the indignity of conceding five on the same field to visiting rivals Betis in El Gran Derbi some six weeks before on the occasion of the Italian’s home debut as coach, Mourinho’s side mustered just a single shot on target on their way to a goalless draw.

The record books might tell us that Wissam Ben Yedder’s brace in Manchester three weeks later sealed United’s limp exit from last season’s competition but the damage was really done back in Andalucia, when Mourinho’s team didn’t show any inclination to go for the kill against inferior, weakened opponents.

Instead, they preferred to concentrate on avoiding defeat, settling for a result that would have looked good in the European Cup era, and only emboldening opponents who could come to England without worrying about the need to cancel out an away goal. This was the moment that it should have been clear that beyond the always-clunky fit with United, Mourinho had become yesterday’s man, an anachronism not only at Old Trafford but at the top table of European football. He said after that exit that "everything had to change at United" but that was up to him. He couldn't, it didn't. Now the much-needed change is his dismissal.

For all but Mourinho’s staunchest apologists, it had been coming for some time. While he may have recently trumpeted his achievements in qualifying from the group stages of the Champions League yet again, it takes time to remember the last time he mastered his subject in a knockout tie - we have to go back four-and-a-half years, to Chelsea’s thrilling quarter-final comeback against Paris Saint-Germain.

When The Blues came up against the French giants again the following season in the last 16 Mourinho was tactically out-thought by Laurent Blanc, of all people, during a Stamford Bridge second leg which the visitors played a large chunk of with a man less after Zlatan Ibrahimovic’s red card. Maybe the feeling upstairs at Old Trafford was that United were doomed to a Groundhog Day against PSG next spring if Mourinho was maintained in his post. Maybe we’d be giving them a bit too much credit by thinking that.

In fairness, Mourinho has never been obsessed with tactical minutiae – or, at least, he has never been that interested in discussing his playing philosophy in any great detail. When he made his first return to Chelsea, also in the Champions League, with Inter on their way to winning the trophy in March 2010, the press conference was an arresting one in the Bridge’s Centenary Hall.

On one side sat the British media, lapping up his quotes and snappy soundbites after his years away. On the other were the travelling Italians, and a tension bordering on mutual contempt between them and Mourinho was palpable. Anyone who asked a question on tactics or personnel, a staple of Serie A coaches’ interaction with the media, was pretty much told to mind their own business.

Back then, Mourinho could get away with it, at least in the wider world, with his star still flying high in the stratosphere. Nobody is – or nobody should be – denying the majesty of those peak years at Porto, Inter and Chelsea, or of much of his spell at Real Madrid, where he took on possibly the greatest club side and coach of modern times and ground them down, even if it all ended in a sorry, bitter, exhausted mess.

We can look back through the annals and acknowledge that even the greatest coaches in the history of the game are lucky to enjoy a decade at the peak of their powers. There is no shame in falling into this category, and Mourinho will always be lauded as one of the greats. For most, the time comes when the game moves on, on and off the pitch.

Sevilla stunned United and exposed Mourinho's cowardice (Getty)

While the thrill of Pep Guardiola – and Jürgen Klopp, Maurizio Sarri and others – has made Mourinho’s ideas looked tired on the field, his way of running things off it has held United back for too long as well. Failing to relate to Pogba, the world’s most expensive player when he returned but someone Mourinho has declined to build a team around, has been an unhelpful partial brake on United’s commercial desire to build the brand around him.

Even at 59, Carlo Ancelotti has managed to adjust his approach at Napoli this season to find his way back to the top. Does Mourinho have the desire to do likewise next? Over to you, José.