Jose tries to paper over cracks
Print Edition
CHELSEA manager Jose Mourinho has become a master at protecting his players when the pressure is on and his complaints about the referee after his team was humbled 3-5 at Tottenham Hotspur on Thursday were not surprising.
The Portuguese coach acknowledged that his defence had made mistakes but he also bemoaned his side’s bad luck and pointed the finger at referee Phil Dowd for not awarding a first-half penalty for an inadvertent handball by Jan Vertonghen.
“We made some defensive mistakes,” he said after Chelsea was swept aside by an exuberant Spurs side, who rallied from an early 0-1 deficit. “We had some individual problems in our defensive structure and that plus unlucky in every rebound and deflected shot and so on we conceded five goals which is something out of our context.
“When you concede five goals it is difficult to get a positive result but in spite of that we scored three and we had chances and lots of initiative to try to score more.
“With the result 1-0, one clear action could give the 2-0 and normally with 2-0 the result would be completely different and the history of the game could be completely different.”
He made similar complaints when Chelsea did not get a penalty against Southampton in last Sunday’s 1-1 draw. “At the end of the day we are speaking about two matches, six points... we have one out of six when two crucial decisions would give us six points,” he added. “What I am shocked (about) is that it’s difficult to understand why but the reality is that in three days (of matches) we had two incredible decisions that punished us in a very hard way.”
Chelsea has picked up four points out of nine over the holiday program, which has allowed Manchester City to move level at the top on 46 points from 20 games with an identical goal difference of plus-25 having both scored 44 goals.
However, Mourinho is showing no sign of hitting the panic button. “The only thing we can do is to work and to play well which is what we are doing all the time and today we did again,” he said. “We made defensive mistakes but when we had the ball we were always dangerous and we create and we had initiative.”
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