London: Chelsea manager Jose Mourinho says his Premier League winning players have not been given the credit they deserve and took time to make fun of the teams that finished below them on Tuesday.
The 52-year-old Portuguese — whose side finished the season eight points clear of 2014 champions Manchester City — used the end of season Chelsea dinner to use a convoluted story to poke fun at City, Arsenal, who finished third, and fourth-placed Manchester United.
To a backdrop of a graphic showing a pitch with two goals he addressed first of all Louis van Gaal-managed United — the ‘plain red shirted team’ — saying they would have preferred to play without goals.
“That team plays really well and the ball goes and goes and goes and the quality of the ball possession is really beautiful, but no goals,” said Mourinho.
“And they ask the international board of FIFA to play like this, but they were told that it was not possible, that the bigger percentage of ball possession doesn’t win matches and they were not champions.”
City, ‘the sky blue shirted team’, at least wanted to play with one goal. “They were fantastic and they scored a lot of goals and the goals were coming from every position and they score and they score and they score, but they never conceded goals, because no goal.
“Again, the international board told them ‘I’m sorry, you can’t be champions because football is with two goals’.”
Vis-a-vis Arsenal, ‘the team with red shirts, white sleeves’ did want to play with two goals.
“They were scoring some, they were also conceding some. They were fantastic. They scored really beautiful goals, they concede some goals too and they were almost there,” said Mourinho, who also guided Chelsea to the League Cup trophy.
“But they asked the international board to play only between January and April. And they were told ‘no chance, no chance’.
“You have to play between August and May, so they couldn’t be champions.”
Which brought him nicely to Chelsea — the team in blue shirts — and why they had won the title and not the other three, even harking back to his days in 2010 as Real coach when he defended his tactics against Barcelona and critics accused him of parking the bus in terms of how many men he put behind the ball.
“They (Chelsea) wanted to play with the normal rules and they know that to win matches they had to score one more goal than the opponent,” said Mourinho.
“How can you do this? By scoring a lot of goals or not conceding and scoring one.
“And they did it both ways. Scoring a lot, conceding some. Scoring one goal and conceding no goals.
“Lots of goals were conceding, they played from August till May and sometimes they brought the bus.” (AFP)
