Wednesday night should have been a celebratory affair for Jose Mourinho.
Any issues he’d experienced during his first season in charge of Manchester United should have been forgotten because he ended the campaign with a European trophy.
But just moments after hoisting and hugging and kissing the silverware, the United boss used the opportunity to seemingly take some shots at members of his squad.
Following the Europa League triumph in Stockholm, Mourinho faced the press and it wasn’t long before he returned to his criticism of certain players whose mindsets he was not wholly impressed by during his first campaign as Red Devils manager.
Throughout the season, Mourinho had some choice words for the likes of Luke Shaw, Anthony Martial, Chris Smalling and Henrikh Mkhitaryan.
That seems to be that then https://t.co/fO164SeJuJ
— FootballJOE (@FootballJOE) April 2, 2017
And, before identifying his biggest weakness as a manager, it seemed like the 54-year-old treated himself to one last dig at one or two of those players named above.
“Some of them can win a big match,” Mourinho told Rio Ferdinand on BT Sport, via Manchester Evening News. “What I think they can’t do is win it and cope with that intensity, especially that mental intensity, the focus, the concentration, the responsibility, the determination.
“This is something you only learn when you are at the highest level. For me what’s more difficult is the fragile mentality.
“I think it’s probably my weakness as a manager, that it’s difficult for me to understand people with a different mentality to what I have.
“It’s difficult to understand so it takes me time to understand and sometimes I’m not able to feel attracted (to the player again).
“Sometimes I ask my assistants to help me on that because maybe they have a different profile to me.”
Some of the players who were initially not trusted by Mourinho have since won the Portuguese over but it seems like he doesn’t yet have faith in certain members of his squad.
One man who has no such worries is Marcus Rashford, as the 19-year-old seized the opportunity to replace the injured Zlatan Ibrahimovic with both hands.
And Mourinho bloody loves him.
“What I love about this kid Marcus is he copes with the pressure. I can press him, I can be very demanding with him, he’s the kind of kid that when the training session finishes it doesn’t finish for him,” Mourinho continued.
“He wants more. He lives for football.
“He was, of course, a tornado, when he arrived last season without pressure. No responsibility. And this season when the pressure was on him, when he was not scoring goals for one, two, three, four months, he coped with that pressure.
“This is the kind of character I like. I like to squeeze the player and the player to cope with it and react to it.
“I want to be in love with the player with this character, with this personality and that kid Marcus is the best example of it, especially in this club.”
