If this is to be the third coming of Jose Mourinho in English football, he has a pattern to protect. Leading his second different club to a League Cup final, it is clear how the Portuguese coach sees the task of turning a football club into a winning one.

Mourinho’s love of the EFL Cup is both well-documented and actually quite influential. Over the past few seasons, the big clubs have been seemingly intent on winning a competition that has roundly been thought of as a mutated younger cousin of the FA Cup: not much worth winning, and it’s a chance for the small teams to get into Europe.

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Not any more. Mourinho changed that. Since 2005 - Mourinho’s first trophy as Chelsea boss - a club who have won the title in the Premier League era has appeared in the final every season apart from one, when Swansea City beat Bradford in 2013. That’s to say, a club you’d usually expect to play the reserves in English football’s least important competition.

The reasoning for the shift is well covered, too. It’s a trophy early in the season that sets you up for the run-in nicely. With fixtures piling up later in the season - especially for clubs in European competition - it’s a trophy in the bank already, and one that eases the pressure and lessens the disaster of failure later on.

In some ways, you could argue that taking the competition seriously is one of the ways in which Mourinho modernised the Premier League. Those reasonings, based on pressure and success, are part of how the game has changed over the past decade or so. As the money has become greater, so too has the price of failure: managers are sacked quickly if they don’t measure up. Price tags are unsheathed at the slightest provocation. How many times has Manchester United’s expenditure been used as a stick with which to beat the club over the past few years when things have gone badly?

Indeed, this is one of the areas where you can clearly separate the old guard from the new. Whereas Jose Mourinho realised that holding the League Cup aloft could ease his burden later in the season, Arsene Wenger has never won the competition. Not once in his 20 years in England. The only time he’s ever reached the final, in fact, was in 2011 when Birmingham City won with a last minute Obafemi Martins goal. But there’s no doubting that a couple of League Cup victories would have taken a lot of the pressure off Wenger in late February when things started to fall apart. And there he is in the same position again this season, whilst Manchester United - a team who spent most of the start of the season trailing Arsenal in most departments - are still alive in three competitions and still battling for a very respectable finish in the league, too.

It’s funny how United didn’t really hit the ground running this season. They won their first three games and hit hard times. That’s why they sit sixth in the league with no hope of winning it. But, unlike Arsenal, they’ve come into form when it mattered. Had the Gunners started poorly but grown into their season the same way as United have, had they taken the League Cup more seriously, they may have found themselves gaining momentum right now instead of looking like the most depressed club in the land having cracked at this stage of the season once again.

Pressure is a terrible thing, but it can also be channeled. If Manchester United are to win the League Cup, it doesn’t take the pressure off completely. But it will channel the remaining pressure into the right place. Success breeds success, and the feeling of trying to go on and win more trophies sure beats the feeling of trying to win the first one.

That’s why Mourinho sees the trophy as one worth winning, but there is one more consideration.

Ever since Sir Alex Ferguson left the club, the winning mentality has vanished. That’s Mourinho’s biggest task: you can win a trophy without the right predator’s scent, but it’s unlikely you’ll win more than one. If United are to build a side that knows how to win, he needs two things: trophies early on to spark the right team spirit and know-how, but more importantly he needs winners in the team.

The first coming of Mourinho instilled the right attitude into a young and raw side. The second relied on men like John Terry who retained that attitude. The third follows the pattern, but it’s a more direct approach: he bought Zlatan Ibrahimovic.

Of all the qualities the Swede possesses, the fact Mourinho signed a man who would give everything to nick a win an away game at Nantes even though he’s already 30 points clear at the top of the table is by far the most important to United.

So the pattern continues. But if they don’t win at Wembley on Sunday, Mourinho will have to find a new method.

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