It has been a tough few weeks to be a football manager.

Sam Allardyce had his sleazy laundry aired in public (well, on camera) and Antonio Conte watched his team exposed in a very different way against Arsenal, while Jose Mourinho has been exposing his own players and their poor performances to the media.

The question for Mourinho is whether or not publicly criticising his players, as he did with Luke Shaw after the game against Watford, is a stable long-term tactic. Or rather, whether or not Mourinho will turn it into a long-term tactic. Because surely it can’t be stable.

But it is the sort of tactic Mourinho uses at times. He singles players out for criticism, takes some of the gloss off a good performance or heaps a little bit of pressure on them to perform better next time after a bad outing.

In his regular Daily Mail column this week, Jamie Carragher’s very first thought is to cast his mind right back to the start of Mourinho’s time in English football, in his first season as Chelsea boss. Carragher reminds us that after a victory against Liverpool in which Joe Cole scored the winner, Mourinho chose to tell the press of his anger at the midfielder, who didn’t carry out his defensive duties after scoring.

Perhaps that wasn’t the perfect example, though. Criticising your player after a victory in which he’s scored would seem to have more of a grounding effect than a blaming one. But what Carragher does seem to leave out is the fact that Chelsea were unbeaten under Mourinho when he criticised Cole. But the very next game, they travelled to Manchester City where a Nicolas Anelka penalty consigned Mourinho to his first defeat in English football. It was their only defeat of the entire Premier League season. Perhaps that starts to make it look like Mourinho’s fault, or maybe by criticising Cole he minimised a problem that could have been a lot bigger than one away defeat. We’ll never know.

You see what Carragher is trying to say, though, that criticism from a manager can be necessary, even if done in public. He goes on to point out that Sir Alex Ferguson would often publicly criticise his players if he felt they needed it. Criticism comes from all sides if you’re a footballer, and as a former defender, Carragher must know that better than anyone else – after all, we’re talking about a man who once scored two own goals in one game whilst playing for Liverpool against Manchester United at Anfield.

The next question we’re all going to ask, though, is if this is all a tactical ploy from Mourinho. Over the years we’ve come to see everything he does as somehow calculated and deliberate, all part of a game designed to disrupt others or gain an advantage somehow.

But after his third straight defeat – something that hadn’t happened to Mourinho in English football up until that Watford game – do we really expect him to come out into the press and play games? Such cold and calculated games?

As a manager, you’re there to set up the team, and when they don’t do what you’ve asked them to do, that must surely be frustrating. It’s all part of the skill of football management, of course, but you get why it would frustrate. And frustrate to the point that you just speak your mind when someone asks you about it literally minutes after the match has ended.

Last weekend, David Moyes suffered what is surely the most frustrating of all possible occurrences as a manager: his side were 2-0 up before surrendering any and all points. At home. In the final minute. The loser/winner conceded through a set piece.

So you can see why he too would come out after a game and criticise his players quite directly. It wasn’t his fault, you can imagine him reasoning, he set his team up well enough to go 2-0 ahead. It was his team’s fault that they couldn’t see it through. You can understand his reaction, then, when a reporter stuffs a microphone under his nose just after the final whistle.

What he told to them in private remains private, of course. But you wonder what the point would be in criticising players through the intermediary of a TV camera anyway. What they say in public can be said just as easily in private.

So when is criticising players all part of the game, part of the plan? And when is criticising them just the reaction of a miffed manager after a defeat?

It’s not the case that there’s always an agenda. But maybe we’ve spent so long with Jose Mourinho and Sir Alex Ferguson that we now see mind games in everything.