Jose Mourinho pointed to fabulous goals and individual heroics, aghast that anyone would dare to criticise the style of Chelsea.
|||Jose Mourinho gazed into his crystal ball and predicted football’s future might as well be played on the moon without goalposts if Chelsea are to be branded boring champions.
Mourinho pointed to fabulous goals and individual heroics, aghast that anyone would dare to criticise the style of a team clearly the best in the Barclays Premier League.
Football’s priorities were muddled, he said, but at least Roman Abramovich is enjoying the game again — and a happy billionaire owner makes for a happy Chelsea manager.
Mourinho can relax so long as the Russian is not bored, and Abramovich has attended the last three matches to see his club zero in on their first title since 2009-10. ‘He is happy, very happy,’ said Mourinho. ‘I saw him hugging players in the dressing room. Every Chelsea fan is happy if we win the title.’
Two more wins will wrap up Chelsea’s fourth Premier League title, but Arsenal fans hit a nerve when they sang: ‘Boring, boring Chelsea’ near the end of the goalless draw at the Emirates.
Mourinho hit back, teasing Arsenal boss Arsene Wenger in his post-match press conference. ‘Boring is no title in 10 years,’ he sniped. ‘Boring is when you want to win at home and take off your No 9.’
He added: ‘I met this morning a gentleman who lives almost next door to me, an Arsenal fan of more than 50 years, and he congratulated me for my press conference, saying I was spot on.’
The Chelsea manager is shocked that some critics question the entertainment value of a team that has scored 65 goals in 33 games.
‘Maybe the future of football is a beautiful, green grass carpet without goals,’ said Mourinho. ‘And on that beautiful pitch, the team with more ball possession wins.
‘Because everyone speaks about teams playing fantastically well: “My team had great ball possession” and “Oh, we build very well”. Good. It looks like the goals aren’t there.
‘You conclude a team that scores as many as us is boring, but a team that has 70 per cent of the ball and doesn’t score isn’t.
‘Maybe when I am a grandad, football will be without goals and we will just enjoy people passing the ball. Maybe putting the ball in the net is not the objective, and stopping the ball from going in your own goal doesn’t matter.
‘When football started centuries ago there was one objective and now it looks like there’s another. Football is about putting the ball in your opponents’ net and keeping it out of your own.’
The debate will go on but Abramovich was suckered in last time, when he tired of winning the Mourinho way and sacked him in 2007 in search of something more.
For six years, Chelsea tried to win with flair but found that it was not easy. Aspiring to recreate Barcelona under Pep Guardiola has proved impossible. Wenger can vouch for that.
‘Barcelona, beautiful every week?’ scoffed Mourinho. And, when it was put to him that at their peak they were exactly that, the former Real Madrid boss replied: ‘When was their peak? When Real Madrid were champions?
‘For me, the beautiful game is to know exactly the way you have to play and what you have to do. At Arsenal, we were brilliant. We were brilliant from the first minute.
‘Style and flair, what is it? The way people analyse style and flair is to take the goals from the pitch. It is the football they play on the moon — and the surface is not good. Some holes. But no goals.
‘It comes from you (the media) or from some managers who can only teach their guys to keep the ball.
‘Who scored the most beautiful goals? Is that a criterion? If so, Chelsea did it collectively with the beauty of some of the goals we scored. Or you go to Charlie Adam, and that is obviously the goal of the season.
‘If the number of goals decides if a team is good, bad or boring, Manchester City scored more, but 18 scored fewer. Then, we have 18 teams more boring than us.
‘If it is the team with more points we are the best. If it is the team with most victories we are the best. If the best team has the fewest defeats, we are the best.
‘If the best team are the champions, not yet, but the team that leads, we are the best team. If the best team has the fewest goals conceded, we are the second best team. In any point of analysis, any criteria, we are the best team or the second best team.’
Mourinho insists all that matters is winning, but he would like the recognition along the way, be it from those paid to assess Chelsea’s performances or from players who voted six of his team into the PFA’s Premier League team of the year.
‘There should have been more,’ he sighed. ‘Just as an example, for Cesc Fabregas not to be there after the season he has had is strange.That team would not win (the title). It is without balance. It is missing a midfielder, and that midfielder should be Fabregas.
‘But I look now as a fan, not a manager. It looks like I’m in a pub discussing things that aren’t important. The important thing is to be champions.’ – Daily Mail
from Soccer Soccer Extended RSS http://ift.tt/1HSeU31
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