'We've been watching and yearning for what a win over Ajax could bring us': Juan Mata looks to set the record straight

It was over dinner, nearly 2,000 miles from home in Rostov, explains Juan Mata, that the sense of what Manchester United were missing really struck home.

The team’s routine these past nine months, during the club’s long and winding 15,000-mile tour of the continent to the Europa League final, has entailed the squad sitting down to dinner on Wednesday nights with the television set tuned to the Champions League. “And, yes, we’d be wishing next season that we are there,” the Spaniard relates.

Jose Mourinho’s players were in the hinterland of north west Russia on the March night that Barcelona’s extraordinary 6-1 comeback over Paris Saint Germain was beamed across the world. But they have been feeling the same disconnect from Europe’s elite since the autumn, when they broke bread in Odessa while Real Madrid and Borussia Dortmund fought out a 2-2 draw. ”Yes, we’d be round the table together having something to eat and then the TV would be put on,” Mata says.

Their chance to reclaim such heights now hinges, of course, on one night in Stockholm, where defeating Ajax in Wednesday’s final will secure qualification for the Champions League, which they last exited amid group stage ignominy after defeat at Wolfsburg 18 months ago.

As a Champions League winner with Chelsea in 2013, Mata thought things would have been better than this when he arrived at Old Trafford the following year. “Since I came here it has not been the greatest moment in the club’s history,” he admits. “It’s been a different approach and a new stage after Sir Alex Ferguson.” It says something for the individual he is that he travels to Sweden this week as a vital component in Mourinho’s machine.

Things ended very badly between the two of them after Mourinho replaced Rafael Benitez as manager at Chelsea. So dislocated was the relationship that Mata ignored the Portuguese when substituted seven minutes after half time against Southampton on New Year’s Day 2014, slammed his seat in the dug-out, threw his arms up in frustration and had to be calmed down by his teammates.

There was also an inauspicious start between them in last August’s Community Shield, when Mata was sent on from the bench after 63 minutes, substituted for Henrikh Mkhitaryan after 89 and did not look happy. He and Mourinho have had no discussions at Old Trafford about the player's exit form west London, he says – “no, it was a normal approach. I cannot control what people will think but I can control myself and my aim.” Yet before sustaining a hernia in March, he had averaged a goal or an assist every 95.7 minutes in 13 games for United: effectively, a vital intervention every game.

One clue to his enduring success is in front of our eyes, in the plastic key ring he uses and his slightly old fashioned watch. There is little of football’s stereotypically inflated ego with Mata: staff at all of the clubs he has played for will tell you that. The 29-year-old is one of those rare specimen at the top of the game who speaks to journalists on a welcoming level, with a joke for the one wearing shorts in the cool Manchester summer. (“You’d wear no clothes if you were in Spain, then?!”)

He’s also one of the few who talk about the real Manchester – the City Art Gallery which he visits and the Matt and Phreds jazz club in the Northern Quarter, with its excellent pizza, ordered from the bar, and equally fine music. He’ll drag along his compatriot Ander Herrera to a few of these places but otherwise finds few takers. “Errm no, no one apart from Ander."

His discussion of what Mourinho has drummed into the players ahead of Ajax illustrates why the two of them are not exactly kindred spirits. “Avoid mistakes” is a mantra Mata references three times and it is quite clear that the examination of the threats posed by Peter Bosz’s side is of more interest than United creative patterns. Desire is “more powerful” than experience, Mata says. “So we need to match [Ajax] in that level, so we need to show illusion, passion and a desire to win.” He is speaking Mourinho’s language.

He would welcome a new contract, he says, with his current four-and- a-half-year deal running to the end of next summer. “I feel privileged to play for Man United. It is something when I’m old I will always be proud of.”

This feels like a very big moment in the clubs’ journey through the post-Ferguson era. Win, reach Europe’s top table again, and it will feel like a season of progress. Lose and Mourinho’s first season - a League Cup to show - will have seemed like a failure.

The sense of Mourinho being a man under pressure is compounded by his demeanour. It’s a black dog mood we’ve seen from him very often in these past few months. Mata is speaking half an hour after Mourinho offered his own pre-Ajax talk, in which he offered no sense of excitement, occasion or anticipation for the week ahead.

The Spaniard insists there is another side to him. “No, I find him… Well I mean it depends on the day…!” he jokes. “No, sometimes he can be very, very funny, especially with the Spanish lads. He speaks Spanish fluently, and he makes jokes normally so, yeah, sometimes obviously when you see him in the press conference he is normally a bit more tough but after he relaxes and he’s quiet…”

But the player also volunteers the observation that time is never on a manager’s side. “Nowadays in football there is no patience,” he says. “If you don’t win you are out. And that is how it is. There is a rush about results (to get wins quickly) and if you don’t think like this you don’t fit the profile to be at the top level so, yeah, he has this mentality but I think every manager I have had felt the same.” A huge week, then, in United’s journey to be a defining part of the football they’ve been viewing on hotel TV sets. “I’m confident that sooner or later we can deliver that and the fans will be really, really happy again,” Mata says. “Hopefully we can start from this final.”