Updated at 12.02

LAST NIGHT’S DEFEAT to Tottenham meant Manchester United had lost two of their opening three games for the first time since the 1992-93 campaign.

It was just the third time they had been beaten by Spurs at Old Trafford in the Premier League era.

The result was also Jose Mourinho’s biggest home defeat in all competitions as a manager.

Boos rung out from a half-empty stadium following the final whistle.

Amid growing impatience among supporters, you will hear it said in the coming days from sympathetic ex-pros and fellow managers that Jose Mourinho ‘deserves time’.

Surely David Moyes also deserved time too, as did Louis Van Gaal. Moyes, however, lasted less than a year in the role of United manager. Van Gaal survived for just under two years. Mourinho has now been at the helm for longer than both his predecessors. Yet it’s hard to argue that United are considerably better off than they were before the Portuguese coach took over at Old Trafford.

Mourinho was appointed precisely because the Red Devils didn’t want a manager who ‘deserves time’. They needed a coach who delivers instantaneous results. The former Porto and Inter boss is clearly someone who has been a quick-fix solution in the past and works towards the short-term, given his track record of invariably trusting in experience over youth, consistently buying players primarily who are in their prime rather than youngsters with potential.

Mourinho has at least mirrored Van Gaal’s feat of winning the a domestic cup, in addition to helping the team triumph in the Europa League the season before last, while the 2017-18 campaign’s second-place finish was the best since the Ferguson era.

Nevertheless, things have historically tended to go awry for Mourinho at clubs where he has stuck around long enough to begin a third season in charge — it has been the case at Chelsea (twice) and to a lesser extent, Real Madrid.

Yet you could argue Mourinho is merely a symptom of the overall problem rather than the root cause of all that is wrong at Old Trafford.

Manchester United at their peak were a club with a vision. The same could surely be said for all the very best sides in history.

The current City team have a vision. Even before Guardiola’s appointment, they were laying the foundations for his arrival in place, bringing in former close associates at Barcelona, such as chief executive Ferran Soriano and director of football Txiki Begiristain.

You get the sense that every player City sign fits the system and their style of play.

Similarly, at their best under Ferguson, Man United were always a club with a vision.

The faith in youngsters, most famously with the Class of ’92, was a crucial part of this strategy, as was the attractive brand of football where playing the ball to feet was essential, with safe or sideways passing rarely tolerated.

The British and Irish core to the team was always seen as significant. Early on, players like Roy Keane, Steve Bruce, Paul Ince and Andy Cole were key figures, while in the later years, Rio Ferdinand, Ryan Giggs, Paul Scholes and Wayne Rooney came increasingly to the fore.

It’s true that under Mourinho, there still exists an element of British players in the team — Phil Jones, Chris Smalling, Jesse Lingard and Marcus Rashford, to cite a couple of examples. Yet unlike the past players mentioned, the names above feel peripheral rather than integral. Lingard and Rashford still have potential and could become top players, while Smalling and Jones have arguably proven that they are not quite good enough at the very elite level.

Sure, you could point to Smalling and Jones’ excellent defensive record last season, nonetheless as Jonathan Wilson among others have pointed out, this stat was mitigated to an extent by the highly disproportionate number of saves David de Gea was having to make.

Since the Ferguson era, Man United have spent more than £600 million on players. Last night though, they were deservedly beaten by a Tottenham team who have been relatively frugal by comparison and relied considerably on a number of young talents that cost little or no money, such as Harry Kane, Dele Alli and Eric Dier, in the way Red Devils teams of old once did.

The underlying problem is Man United don’t have a vision. They may have dabbled with this idea at one stage in the recent past, but abandoned it as soon as David Moyes’ six-year contract was prematurely cancelled.

After this debacle, they suddenly had to buy players that suited Louis van Gaal’s style and when this project was put to bed with similar haste, it felt as if their new plan was simply to buy an abundance of big-name stars (Ibrahimovic, Pogba, Sanchez, Lukaku), appoint a high-profile manager (Mourinho) and hope that everything would somehow come together.

There is a sense of desperation at United now. Making six changes three games into the season suggests as much, as does Mourinho boasting about his past achievements in press conferences in a manner that resembles Norma Desmond, the faded silent movie star in ‘Sunset Boulevard’ who is living on past glories: “I am big, it’s the pictures that got small,” she insists. 

Amid all this chaos, the words of Bobby Charlton — arguably Man United’s greatest ever player — are starting to look increasingly prophetic by the day. The World Cup-winning legend suggested the controversial coach was not a good fit for the club.

“A United manager wouldn’t do that,” he told The Guardian’s Jamie Jackson in 2012 in relation to the infamous eye-poke of then-Barcelona assistant Tito Vilanova. “Mourinho is a really good coach but that’s as far as I would go really.” 

The United hierarchy’s desperate need for success meant they ignored the advice of one of the most powerful and important figures in their history, although amid several reports of in-fighting and acrimony, and with the ultimate ‘results manager’ looking so unconvincing of late, perhaps they are privately ruing that decision now.

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