They don’t meet on the pitch until November, but Manchester United Manager Jose Mourinho has already started the mind games against his former club, Chelsea. In fact, he’s already escalating the mind games that he previously commenced during the international break.
In an interview with The Times earlier this week, Mourinho claimed that his second Chelsea league title winning team was ‘more offensive’ than Claudio Ranieri’s Cinderella story Leicester City champions, or Antonio Conte’s current reigning champs.
Last time, Mourinho said that his most recent Chelsea title winners had more entertainment value than Conte’s side.
Now he took that commentary a step further, and claimed that Chelsea played defensive, pragmatic football last season. He also described the various ways that his current United team will play this season- at times they will be attacking, at others pragmatic and defensive-minded.
“We try to play the best we can,” Mourinho told his weekly news conference yesterday.
“We know that if you look in a pragmatic way, you see the last winners of the Premier League, the last winners of the Premier League, they did not play attacking football. They played defensive football and counter-attack football.”
“So according to the results, that is the way to win the Premier League. We try to play according to the qualities of our players. We try to play positive, we try to play good, but we try to win.
“If one day to win we have to play defensive football, we have to do it, and if we go to Stoke and Stoke in some moments of the match, they put us under pressure and they are dominant, we have to be humble and we have to be pragmatic and we have to face the reality.”
“If you ask me, are we going to go there and play with seven at the back, like some teams do, five plus two? No, we’re not going to do that.
“We’re going to try and play well and score goals, but if our opponent is better than us and dominant, we are humble enough to transform our way of playing to play for a result.”
Mourinho and United travel to Chelsea on November 5th, with the Old Trafford meeting coming on February 24th. It’s also possible the two sides could meet in a domestic tournament competition, as they did last season when Chelsea eliminated United from the FA Cup.
Paul M. Banks runs The Sports Bank.net and TheBank.News, which is partnered with News Now and Minute Media. Banks, a former writer for the Washington Times, NBC Chicago.com and Chicago Tribune.com, currently contributes regularly to WGN CLTV and Chicago Now.
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