Jose Mourinho congratulates West Ham scout for discovering “monster”

Jose Mourinho found a fault with each of the three goals his side conceded on Saturday.

Mourinho feels that his Manchester United team was hard done by on the first and third goals scored by West Ham this weekend, pointing to an offside ahead of Felipe Anderson’s opener and a foul in the build-up to Marko Arnautovic’s finish.

The United manager criticised his own players’ desire for the own goal which came from Andriy Yarmolenko’s strike but Mourinho was full of praise for the opposition.

Mark Noble might have taken home the official man of the match award but Mourinho was particularly impressed by the young defender, Issa Diop, who arrived from Toulouse in the summer.

While the fee for Diop, 21, was not disclosed, it’s understood that the French centre-half moved to the Hammers for a club record fee of around £22 million.

“I think a team that comes with the kind of mental fragility from the bad result (against Derby County) and comes here to fall 1-0 down after five minutes, it’s not the best way to start,” Mourinho told BT Sport after the match.

“The first goal was offside, it was a goal that last Tuesday wouldn’t have been a goal because of VAR. But we had no VAR and it was a linesman mistake.

“Then in the first half, we had a good reaction but the own goal made it 2-0. We knew that Yarmolenko is very, very, very left-footed and we knew that we had to cover that side. We had Matic on the ball, we had Luke Shaw and  Lindelof very close by. But we were not intense or aggressive enough to close down the shot and then we were losing 2-0 thanks to an offside goal and an own goal.

“In the second half, we took a little bit of time to react but then we did.

“The goalkeeper made a couple of fantastic saves. The centre-backs had a fantastic match.

“Congratulations to the scout who found the 21-year-old kid, Diop. He was a monster and dominated every single duel. 

“Then we scored to make it 2-1 but instead of the linesman’s mistake, there was a referee’s mistake because there was a foul on Marcus Rashford. Zabaleta doesn’t make an attempt to play the ball, he just pulled the player from behind and then the third goal kills the game and mentally kills the team that had a reaction and had a bit of the reward for that reaction with the goal we scored.

“We had 20/25 minutes to play, believing we could change the result but then the third goal kills the game.”