Well he didn't have to play them
@Theo88 and
@Wumminator . For a start he could and should have used Mata more over these two non PL standard footballers, he would 100% have provided more goals, assists and quality even if he's not at Bruno's level.
Ole literally started the season for the first 4 games before Pogba's injury with Matic and Tuanzebe benched (2 DM options there, and Mata benched) and played Pogba deep so that he could fit one of Lingard or Andreas in at AM. In game 5 he put Fred on the bench to start Andreas. When Pogba came back he benched Matic AND Fred so he could play both of them vs. Arsenal
. In the following game we lost to Newcastle with Matic benched for Andreas again. By this point
we're up to October 6th, we've an awful record in the league and the management team is still refusing to start a single game without either Andreas or Lingard in the starting line-up despite having much better options than them on the bench.
After October 6th, Matic is injured, Pogba is out for months and your point becomes "somewhat valid", until January the management had not much choice if they didn't wanna go with Mata or a youth product like say Gomes.
So let's be honest here, the management team clearly believed in the two of them at the start of the season. There's a strong chance we went purposely into this season not pursuing the Bruno option due to optimism that Andreas or Lingard would "
step up".
Once again people, don't rewrite the past. It happened, the management have learnt from it and corrected it. That's good management to always learn and to continue to evolve. It may well be the pig-headedness that prevents Mourinho from ever being a top top manager again.