“I am sure it is a four-horse race now. They have a big advantage because they don’t play in the Champions League,” said Mourinho of Liverpool
“If Brendan has a chihuahua it is one that trains a lot and rests a lot. The other dogs, they don’t train a lot because they play a lot and they don’t rest because they play every three days.”
“And when the Barclays Premier League goes to the crucial point, we all will have to play Champions League at the same time.”
“To play, for example, like we are going to do in Istanbul against Galatasaray on the Wednesday, Fulham on the Saturday.”
“Brendan’s chihuahua doesn’t do that. During the week it sleeps, eats and trains a little bit. So I have to say his chihuahua is a privileged one. Next season he will see what it is like to play in two, three, four competitions. This season he has this privilege which gives him a big advantage.”
“If we don’t win it I would prefer Brendan to win it because he is my friend. When I play against my friend I want to win and he wants to win. But if I don’t win, I would like Brendan to do it.”
Mourinho continued by rejecting claims that Arsenal’s side is too young to challenge for the title, insisting that they have a squad of ‘mature players.’
“Arsenal have spent many, many years working together making these players grow up,” he said.
“Jack Wilshere, Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain, Theo Walcott and Kieran Gibbs — they are not kids any more. They were kids but now they are mature players.”
“The manager, with this group of players, four, five or six years working with these players and then adding fantastic players like Mesut Ozil, Santi Cazorla or Per Mertesacker, they are a very good team.”
Such a claim flies in the face of many of Mourinho’s previous comments. He has spent much of the season telling anyone that will listen that his developing side is too inexperienced to challenge for the title.
However, both Wilshere and Oxlade-Chamberlain are younger than every single player to have started a league game for Chelsea this season, whilst Arsenal’s squad is arguably also still in the development stage given that injuries, age and the lack of a top class striker have deprived them of the starting eleven that Wenger is likely to call upon in future seasons.
Despite this, Mourinho insists that he has not been playing mind games. He stressed that his team lack the cutting edge in front of goal to be the favourites, claiming that the games that they have lost this season have been the “easy games.”
“If you are talking about the team that looks really solid, the team that defends well but at the same time creates a lot — that is my team,” he said.
“But when I say we’re not the top candidate everyone thinks, “Here he is again”, with what you like to call the mind games. But it’s just my feeling.”
“The matches I have lost were matches we should have won. They were the easy ones to win. The match against Everton was so easy to win but we couldn’t score a goal out of I don’t know how many chances. But we conceded and we lost.”
“We went to Newcastle; it was so easy to win. In the first 30 minutes we hit the post, we had chances but we lost the game. We went to Stoke; it was so easy to win. Against West Ham we had 25 shots on goal.”
“We are a team that if we had that last “click”, that click is to put the ball in the net, then I would say to you that we are favourites. Our team is going in a very good direction but at this moment I would not say we are favourites, but we are candidates.”
Chelsea travel to Manchester City in the FA Cup this weekend, having beaten the same opponents 1-0 in the league less than two weeks ago.
“We have a very difficult draw in the FA Cup. We play the best team in the country in their house,” continued Mourinho
“We have beaten them twice but that makes it even more difficult to beat them for a third time. And if people were saying that the last time we did it there was no Fernandinho and no Sergio Aguero, the first time we beat them they were playing.”
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