Jose Mourinho believes that despite his strong Tottenham Hotspur squad there are certain players like Harry Kane who just cannot be rested. It was last January that injuries began to mount up for Tottenham with Kane, Moussa Sissoko and Tanguy Ndombele all suffering injuries on New Year’s Day at Southampton, while captain Hugo Lloris was still out with an elbow injury. As the games continued to come thick and fast, Mourinho also lost Son Heung-min and Steven Bergwijn to injury in a nightmare start to the year. However, when asked whether he would have to manage Kane’s minutes during this festive period to prevent another long-term absence for a player who has hit new heights in his game, the Spurs head coach’s answer was dripping in sarcasm.
Jose Mourinho said “Yeah, tomorrow [against Liverpool] he is not playing. I give him a rest, so no risk of injury, Yeah, and against Leicester I rest him again to protect him from injury. I want to win matches and to win matches, I have to play with my best players. If there is an alert of something that’s not going well, of course we have to make decisions. We have people working very hard on that, on the prevention, on the detection of problems. From the medical staff to the nutritionists to the analysts, we have lots of people working at that level with every player. We have the red light, the green light and the orange light and I promise you that if a player is on the orange light we’re going to protect him, but when the players are on the green light and they tell us, “I feel fine”, then great. Sometimes though injuries happen when you’re in an amazing moment and there are no signs that anything can happen. That’s the way it is. Our calendar is really hard. I managed Harry in the matches where I felt I could. He didn’t play much in the Europa League matches so out of these six matches in the Europa League, some he didn’t even play one minute and others he played 45 or 30. So in there we managed to [rest him], but now Premier League every match is what it is. We have this sequence of matches – Liverpool, Leicester, Stoke in the quarter-final – and I need to best players to play.”
