Jose Mourinho: Football about goals, not style

Arsenal supporters chanted "boring, boring Chelsea" at the end of Sunday's goalless draw at the Emirates which leaves Mourinho's men 10 points clear and within two victories of the title.

As he had on Sunday, Mourinho railed against the accusation that his side were boring, saying that "cannot be true". And in a culture which increasingly fetishises possession, Mourinho re-established football's traditional principles, in his own unique way.

"In any point of analysis in any criteria you can find, we are the best team or the second-best team. As simple as that," the Portuguese said at a media conference to preview Wednesday night's match against Leicester. "What is that? Style and flair? The way people now analyse style and flair is to take the goals out of the pitch. It's the football they play on the moon, and the surface is not good. Some holes. But no goals.

"It looks like the goals are not there. Sometimes you speak about 'boring' and you consider boring a team that scores as many goals as we do, but you don't consider boring a team that has 70 per cent of the ball possession and cannot win the game. It's quite a big contradiction.

"I ask myself if in the future, when I am a granddad and I am at home with my grandsons, and maybe the future of football is a beautiful green grass carpet without goals. Football started a few centuries ago and the objective was one, but now it looks like the objective is another one.

"For me, I am very simple in my analysis. Football is about putting the ball in the net of your opponent and stopping your opponent. When football becomes without goals, you will say it's boring. You will say bring the goals back."

Jack Pitt-Brooke, The Independent: "This was Jose Mourinho’s dystopian moment, where he drew up his vision for what will become of football if it continues on this popular path. Mourinho is a rare voice at the top end of the game, a proud unbeliever in the modern religion of ball possession. His simple commitment is to winning matches and while he is not wholly opposed to aesthetic concerns, he does not think they automatically equate to endless passing. The overwhelming emotion, then, when Mourinho has to justify his methods to those who have won less, is bafflement. Why does the world value anything other than trophies? Why has possession –an element of the game but not its goal – been recently elevated into the only measurement of morality or style in football? Mourinho is proud of the fact he stands against this trend, against possession- fetishisation – and that is why he took the opportunity to imagine mockingly a world where it was the only thing that mattered."

Jonathan Wilson, WhoScored: "Last week I wrote a piece for the Guardian in which I described Jose Mourinho as a fallen angel; an extraordinary number of top-level modern coaches worked at Barcelona in the nineties – not only Mourinho but also Pep Guardiola, Luis Enrique, Louis van Gaal, Julen Lopetegui, Ronald Koeman, Frank De Boer, Philip Cocu and Laurent Blanc – but where the rest all prefer a style based on pressing and possession, the Chelsea manager, at least in big games, favours a reactive approach. He is happy for his team to sit deep and wait for mistakes. None of that seems to me especially controversial, but the piece attracted well over 1000 comments and I was besieged on Twitter. The point was not to criticise Mourinho, but to acknowledge that there is a facet of the game in which he excels; he has the courage to step apart from the crowd and do things his own way and that is why he is so successful.

"I speculated that one of the reasons he so revelled in that role was that he felt a sense of rejection from Barcelona and so relished showing theirs wasn’t the only way of doing things. Perhaps because I wrote the piece in St Peter’s Square in Rome while waiting for the Pope, I made the connection to Satan in Paradise Lost, which I suppose to those who haven’t read the poem may seem condemnatory. Satan, though, despite Milton’s best intentions, rapidly becomes the hero of the poem, aligning himself against a far more powerful force on a point of principle. One of the fascinations of Paradise Lost is Milton wrestling with the fact that Satan is a more attractive character than the often priggish heroes of heaven – just as those who prefer Barcelona’s style of play often become sanctimonious in insisting it is the 'right' way."

For Mourinho, beauty is in performing to get a result. "The beautiful game is to go to every game and know exactly the way you have to play and what you have to do," he said. "(At Arsenal) we were brilliant. Brilliant. A game where we were brilliant from the first minute."

It has long been suggested that Chelsea owner Roman Abramovich wants to watch a side akin to Barcelona of a few years ago, when Lionel Messi starred with Xavi and Andres Iniesta with a style known as tiki-taka.

Yet so happy was the Russian billionaire with Chelsea's display at the Emirates Stadium that he embraced the players afterwards as Chelsea neared a first Premier League title in five years.

"I saw him hugging the players in the dressing room after the game," Mourinho said. "I think he's happy and I think every Chelsea fan is happy if we win the title. If we win the title, we have a fantastic Premier League with everything."

The Blues boss immediately after Sunday's draw criticised Arsenal boss Arsene Wenger for not trying to win the game and for the Gunners' 11-year wait for the title.

Put to him on Monday that Arsenal fans felt Chelsea were boring, Mourinho said: "I'm not sure of that. I met an Arsenal fan this morning, a gentleman that lives almost next door to me, an Arsenal fan for more than 50 years and he congratulated me for my press conference, saying that I was spot-on."

Mourinho thinks the media and some rival managers are responsible for the perception of Chelsea.

"If you tell the truth, people will read the truth, and people will listen to the truth. It's as simple as that," he said. "It's about establishing the criteria: who scored the most beautiful goals in the Premier League? Is that a criteria? If so, Chelsea did it collectively. If the concept is the number of goals, okay Man City scored more than us. But 18 (teams) scored less."

Mourinho derided the suggestion that Barcelona's brand of football under Pep Guardiola was the aspiration for Chelsea.

"Barcelona beautiful game every week?" the former Real Madrid boss added. "When they were at their peak was when? When Real Madrid were champions (in 2011-12)?"

Asked about the robust play of Atletico Madrid, who won Spain's Primera Division title in 2013-14 and reached the Champions League final at Chelsea's expense, Mourinho refused to be critical.

He said: "They beat us, and reached the Champions League final. They were champions in Spain playing against Real Madrid and Barcelona. But can you compare Chelsea with Atletico? You can't. They are the best in the way they play. Full respect for them.

"But tell me in the Premier League who plays better than us? No one? So tell that (to the public). Do you think there is in the Premier League one manager who will say that Chelsea don't deserve to be champions? I think, out of 19 managers, a huge percentage will say Chelsea deserve to win the league."

Mourinho is right: winning is more important than style, and though he seems only too happy to wage war on tiki-taka enthusiasts, it's not entirely fair to put him at the forefront of this cultural divide. If you remember, Chelsea did play some superb football in the first half of the season and Mourinho is not by nature ultra-defensive, he just knows when and how to shut games down and that's why he is such an outstanding manager who wins trophy after trophy. It's a world apart from what Guardiola is doing, but both are driven by an incessant need to win - they just have different means to achieve that end. At this level, pretty passing for the sake of it is pointless. There needs to be a result as well.