Jose Mourinho believes his side’s sorrowful start to the Premier League season was down to a pre-season that was deranging by players getting coronavirus and the international fixtures and also had a dig at the officials.
Tottenham went down 1-0 to Everton through Dominic Calvert-Lewin’s second-half strong header in north London.
💥 | BULLET HEADER!@CalvertLewin14 up and running for 2020/21 – and so are we! 🔵 pic.twitter.com/nzkDDQ0jLJ
— Everton (@Everton) September 13, 2020
Mourinho has only had a few sessions with his whole squad as several unknown players tested positive for Covid-19, more had to quarantine as a result of coming into confine and then a host of his team players travelled to play with their national teams respectively.
Mourinho said he “did not like his team” and they lacked toughness, but did give them dealing in the shape of poor preparation.
“Harry Kane trained with us once,” he said.
“Moussa Sissoko, a couple and I am not going player by player. For different reasons, many of our players didn’t have proper pre-seasons.
“We had cases of positive COVID, we have the right not to say which players, but we had players, we had other players in quarantine due to proximity with positive players.
“We had a player in quarantine because he was on holiday in a country which the government quarantined, we had national teams where many of them went to their team so it was a difficult pre-season.
“I couldn’t expect them to be sharp, intense, agile. But I was expecting much more individually and collectively.
“It disappoints me, and that is where I have now to work. The players who didn’t have pre-season, we don’t have now the possibility to give them a pre-season but we have a lot of matches now to play consecutively and we have to use these matches, not just to win them and the knockout ones are obviously decisive ones with everything decided in 120 minutes or even penalties, and try to use this to improve the form of some players because some of them were really in trouble.”
Spurs had some good chances in the first half but were complete truant after the break and Calvert-Lewin’s 55th-minute header was enough for Everton.
Everton received free-kick through foul from Spurs, where Lucas Digne’s free-kick resulted in the only goal in 90 minutes game, but Mourinho was not happy with where the delivery was taken from.
“I didn’t like my team, but I didn’t like that so many referees on the pitch and on the touchline and in front of the screen allow a free-kick to be taken five or six metres in front to allow a completely different angle of delivery.
“I can complain now because I was complaining before the goal. But I didn’t like my team.”
For Everton, this was a statement of intent that this could finally be the year they crack the top six after several false dawns.
Carlo Ancelotti has been backed in the summer and all three signings – Allan, Abdoulaye Doucoure and James Rodriguez – impressed in a win that could have been far more handsome.
