I switch between having sympathy for Mourinho because certain players are completely letting him and the side down and getting really frustrated because a lot of our issues are due to poor coaching.
I don't know what a manager can do when players make really basic mistakes game after game (drop them would be my choice). Matic has cost us so may goals this season. I honestly don't think our defence (young excluded) has been that poor. They are just being screwed over by Matic massively. The number of times Matic just leaves his man boggles the mind. He will either completely ignore him and gently jog back 5 yards behind his man or he will mark him until his man moves and just completely lose him. When you are a defender and you look around you and see that every attacker is marked, what else can you do? 5 seconds later the ball is in the back of the net and you are wondering how an attacker suddenly was in 5 yards of space.
You can't do anything when players screw up the simple stuff. If your strikers are missing one on ones regularly etc. For Citys first goal yesterday we had about 4 players against Citys 2 and they still weren't marked and Silva taps it in. Second goal perhaps DDG should have done better but City have one of the top strikers in the world who will win you games on his own. Third goal Matic marks Gundogan a few yards from goal and then just stands there when the ball comes in and they tap it in.
2 of Citys goals are down to awful defending. People not doing the really simple job of marking a man, tracking a man or simply paying enough attention.
I think Mourinho could turn this team around but he will need to buy another 3 players for a lot of money and I think we should be spending that money with a manager who plays a better style of football. If we had someone like Kante as our DM we would look miles better than we are at the moment. Matic is literally causing half of the problems in the team with his awful defensive work and inability to transition into attack quickly. You can compensate for a DM that isn't there sometimes but you can't compensate for one that appears to be in the right places but doesn't act when they need to.
I agree regarding Matic, it's not until you start watching him that you realise his work rate and marking are atrocious. I'm concerned that his legs have gone and that Kante made him look great in his latter years at Chelsea. As pundits have said before, Kante does the work of two players so anyone would look incredible alongside him. Unfortunately Fred has looked pretty poor so far this season so unless Mourinho is willing to take a punt on him there aren't really a lot of potential replacements for Matic. He could try Fred, Herrera and Pogba in midfield but I fear that Herrera would be left exposed by Fred's lack of positional discipline.
It's hard to know what United can do to improve things. I don't believe that Mourinho is capable of overhauling Pep, other than one season at Real Madrid Pep has always had Mourinho's number. I think we're seeing common traits from City, Liverpool and Chelsea that United lack. We're seeing all three of those teams play with a high work rate, pressing aggressively to close down players all over the pitch, then having lots of movement, pace and interchange up front when attacking. To a lesser extent Arsenal and Spurs play a similar type of football as well. In that respect United look like the odd ones out. As Gary Neville said yesterday after the game, United rely on 'moments', individual brilliance from players, or the odd clever interchange between two players, and being a threat on set pieces. That type of football might get you by in games here and there, such as against Juventus during the week, and will probably mean that you have enough to beat the smaller teams, but you're not going to have enough consistently throughout the season to trouble the likes of City, and now Liverpool and Chelsea.
Having said that, I struggle to think of any managers out there who we might realistically be able to get and who would play the type of football that the other big teams play, and there's no point taking a punt on someone like Zidane in the hope that he might get more out of this squad. The other issue is that this squad has been built with Mourinho's style of football in mind. Even if we did get a manager in the style of the ones mentioned above they would probably want to get rid of quite a few of our squad and get in players that suited their type of football, which would mean another enormous outlay. I'm not sure United are able or willing to keep on spending at the level City can.