José Mourinho says he has no problem “feeding the Einsteins” who criticise him but admits frustration at not being able to protect his Manchester United players from them.
The manager and the team have drawn negativity for United’s run of three consecutive defeats prior to Wednesday’s 3-1 victory at Northampton Town in the EFL Cup. Following the victory, Mourinho spoke of the “football Einsteins [who] tried to delete 16 years of my career”.
Asked precisely what had upset him the Portuguese said during his pre-match press conference on Friday: “I am [not] upset with anything. I am such a lucky guy that I cannot be upset with anything. I am upset with nothing. The only thing that upsets me a little bit is the kind of criticism to my players because my players are my players.
“I should protect them, I would love to protect them, and from you [media] I can’t. It is something that is completely out of my control. That doesn’t upset me, just gives me a feeling that it’s hard. It’s like when you want to protect people and you can’t. I think it’s a feeling of frustration, but with me it’s fine and with the Einsteins it’s fine.
“The Einsteins need money to live, they can’t coach, they can’t sit on the bench, they can’t win matches. They can speak, they can write, they can criticise the work of other people, but I am a good man. I am good man of goodwill. I do lots of charity, I help so many people, so why not also feed the Einsteins? That’s fine.”
Mourinho has recently criticised in public the performances of Jesse Lingard, Luke Shaw, Eric Bailly, Henrikh Mkhitaryan and Daley Blind. Of this he said: “It’s a learning process, you make a mistake, especially the kind of individual mistake, you have to learn with what that means for the team, a team that works during the week on a game plan.
“Sometimes not during the whole week for the same match because now we are having a game every three days - but to try to have a game plan, try to identify some defensive and attacking agreements between all of us, then in the game the individual mistake you can be punished by that.
“It happened to us. We can obviously try to control our own mistakes, that’s what we try all the time. The critique is part of the evolution, the critique is part of the process, the critique helps people to learn how to cope with critics. It’s their life. From you, they cannot expect other thing than be ready to smash them when they have periods of not so much success.”
Mourinho aimed another dig at his critics when speaking of Saturday’s midday meeting with Leicester City at Old Trafford by mockingly describing himself as the poorest manager ever. Claudio Ranieri’s side are the champions and the 53-year-old pointed to his own record in making Chelsea only the second club – along with United – to retain the Premier League title.
“It is obviously very difficult to retain the title – not for Leicester, for everyone – history says that. Not many teams during the Premier League history they could do that. One of the teams was, of course, Man United, another one was some team managed from the worst manager in the history of football, but it’s really difficult
“But the reality is I look at them and they are very good, they are very good. They won the Premier League because some of the big teams were not good enough last season, but they won because they were very good and they are still very good.
“I think they are a very easy team to analyse, a very easy team to understand. Their defensive process is clear, their attacking organisation is very easy to understand, too, but it is very difficult to cope with it. It is very difficult to keep a clean sheet against a team like Leicester and it is difficult to score goals against a team like Leicester. I keep repeating, easy to understand but difficult to play against.”
