Jose Mourinho insists he won’t walk out on the challenge of resurrecting Manchester United even if his side lacks the star factor.
The Old Trafford boss has cut a frustrated figure with his comments on life away from his family in a large city hotel.
But on the eve of Burnley’s visit Mourinho maintains nothing has changed in his determination to win trophies for his new club. He knew the challenge when he arrived – nothing has changed.
He said: “It’s not the way I prefer, it’s just the way it is. It’s the way I arrived at the club without Paul Scholes, Ryan Giggs, Roy Keane or Bryan Robson.
“I arrived later with a very good group of players to work with but many of them are not the end product, they are not ready, ready, ready, and some of them like Michael Carrick are in a period where they are phenomenal but they are not in the group that is 24 or 25.
“It is a process but I don’t change a word from the first day – we want to win. At this club you must say that always and at this moment we still have four competitions to win. Let’s see out of the four what we win – four, three, two, one or nothing.
“In three months it is not so easy to change the most difficult thing which are personalities. The style of play, even with mistakes, you can change here and there but at the psychological level it takes more time especially if you go against the nature of some of the personalities.
“When you don’t have a very experienced squad where everybody knows how to win, what is needed to win, is a more difficult time.”
But while he looks at other managers who have taken over already developed clubs – like Pep Guardiola at Manchester City – for Mourinho it’s always been about initially biting the bullet.
“I have always gone to clubs in a non-easy process. I never went to a winning club with recent success where you can just introduce a bit of your salt and pepper and change the direction and the road to success was there,” he said.
“I always had difficult moments. Then I left Porto as European champions, I left Inter as European champions, I left Chelsea with two titles in three years and I left Real Madrid with three Champions League semi-finals and with a title and then I got this club in a hard situation but it is a great job.”
Mourinho also won back some kudos with the midweek win over neighbours Manchester City in the League Cup after the knives were being sharpened in some quarters.
“We need time. It is always the same story. At some clubs and with some managers they have all the time they want.
“Some clubs get time but with others you demand immediate success of the clubs and the managers. That’s Manchester United and Jose Mourinho. No problem.
“What I know is in the last seven matches we lost one. It’s better to lose one match 4-0 than lose four matches 1-0 – that’s 12 points. One match 1-0 is 3 pts. Our last run of results is not bad, the performance level even better.
“It was very important for the players to win against Manchester City and to give back to the fans. Not the compensation for the bad defeat (against Chelsea) because there is no compensation, but to give the fans a good feeling to win against a City rival and progress in competition in which Manchester United not been successful in the last years.”
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