José Mourinho has said he should moan more after concluding that Manchester United are not afforded enough sympathy about their injury problems because he does not complain enough.
The United manager irritated Antonio Conte last month by saying other managers “cry, cry, cry” about injuries but, as he prepares to face the Italian at Stamford Bridge on Sunday, Mourinho argued he ought to copy his counterparts.
He believes his rivals would have lamented the absence of the hamstrung Paul Pogba more loudly and frequently had they lost the £89m midfielder’s services. The Frenchman has not played since September and United have won nine of the 11 matches he has missed while remaining in the top two of the table and extending their 100% start in the Champions League.
Mourinho said he preferred to talk about the players at his disposal than those who are unavailable but feels United should have been granted more understanding given they have been without Pogba, last season’s top scorer Zlatan Ibrahimovic, the club captain Michael Carrick and the influential Marouane Fellaini.
“It’s my fault because I should cry every week about our injuries and remind everybody, day after day or press conference after press conference,” he said. “So it’s my fault. It’s my decision. It’s my way of dealing with problems. It’s my way of trying to motivate and respect and give confidence to the players that are going to replace those people. But maybe I have to reconsider my profile. I know that I moan about a lot of things but I don’t with injuries and probably I should.
“I think any other manager would be speaking about Pogba every day. ‘Oh, I don’t have Pogba. Oh, when will I have Pogba? Oh, 10 matches without Pogba. Oh, all the Champions League group phase without Pogba. Oh, all the big matches, against Liverpool, against Chelsea, against Spurs without Pogba. Oh.’ I don’t speak about Pogba one single time. It’s only when you ask me about his situation. And it’s not just Pogba. It’s Pogba, it’s Fellaini, it’s Carrick, it’s Ibra, it’s Marcos Rojo. It’s a big group of players. So I think we are doing very, very well.”
United scored four goals in six of their opening 11 matches but have mustered only seven in their past six games, when they have been deprived of more players, and Mourinho claimed his critics had deliberately overlooked their prolific start to the campaign.
“I really think that you and the specialists know the football that we were playing at the beginning of the season,” he said. “You know. Now you pretend that you don’t know. Now you pretend that we never played amazing football, that we never scored lots of goals, that we never scored amazing goals. That we never had our midfield players and our defenders arriving in the opposition box and scoring goals and creating chances.
“I know that you know that. You just pretend, because it’s convenient for you to pretend that these things didn’t exist. But they exist. And we miss our players, of course we miss our players. And we have to play big matches without them, and we are probably going to play one more without them again.”
Mourinho shrugged off an offer from the Manchester United Supporters’ Trust to meet him to discuss his gripes about the atmosphere at Old Trafford after some boos greeted his decision to replace Marcus Rashford with the eventual goalscorer Anthony Martial against Tottenham Hotspur last week. “I think a quarter of the planet is Manchester United red,” he said. “I cannot meet a quarter of the planet.”