Jose Mourinho met the media a few hours ago to preview tomorrow’s major clash at Arsenal and we have the video for you at this link. A significant portion of the session revolved around the widely held belief that Mourinho will park the bus tomorrow in the weekend’s headliner fixture.
Mourinho is notorious for doing this kind of thing. If you Google “park the bus” literally the fourth auto-fill is “Mourinho,” the fifth “Man Utd” and the seventh “Chelsea.”
Partially due to his ultra-pragmatic approach in large games, Mourinho has not won an away match at a top-six rival since Chelsea’s 2-1 victory at Liverpool at Anfield in November of 2014.
The Portugese answered a question today about people believing he’ll go tedious and boring in his approach on Saturday.
“When we have the ball we are going to attack with 11 players because the goalkeeper knows what to do when we have the ball and when Arsenal have the ball we will defend with 11,” Mourinho answered, making a vow to truly attack Arsene Wenger’s team.
“I play a game at a time, I play a game at a time, and is the way to do it, is the way to do it.”
“Yesterday, I was watching an interesting movie, ‘Borg vs. McEnroe,’ and Borg’s coach was telling him that all the time, one point at a time, think about just one point and I tell my players just think about the game,” Mourinho continued.
“Is just the game, it is Arsenal, we don’t think about how many points behind, is just Arsenal, is difficult enough for us to be focused on other things. Focus on this.”
Mourinho’s counterpart, Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger, was also asked about this topic. You can view the video over at this link, but here’s his response to a query about Mourinho parking the bus.
“No, I don’t expect anything special. I just expect us to be ready to recover now. Man United is a strong team and I expect us just to cope with the problems they will give us. They will attack as well. They will not only defend,” Wenger said.
“It is a game between Arsenal and Man United at home. I just want to focus and to prepare well my team, and give my team a good chance to win the game. Man United is doing well at the moment, we are doing well at the moment, so it looks to be a promising game.”
Paul M. Banks runs The Sports Bank.net and TheBank.News, which is partnered with News Now. Banks, a former writer for the Washington Times, NBC Chicago.com and Chicago Tribune.com, currently contributes regularly to WGN CLTV and the Tribune company’s blogging community Chicago Now.
Follow him on Twitter, Instagram, Sound Cloud, LinkedIn and YouTube.