Jose Mourinho
Tottenham manager Jose Mourinho had sympathies with Brendan Rodgers who had to play without three main players on the pitch and the Portuguese revealed his game plan against City where it was a deliberate tactic by him to have less possession of the ball. A blistering first-half performance saw Spurs beat Leicester 3-0 in the match.
Jose Mourinho said “I think it was an intelligent performance. I knew that for them to play with this back five is not a very comfortable situation, I want to be honest with Brendan [Rodgers]. I don’t remember someone was so honest with me when I was playing without a striker, but I want to be honest with Brendan and it’s easy to analyse that to play without Ricardo Pereira, Soyuncu and Chilwell destroys a backline. So we decided to take away from them where they can hurt us, which is basically behind us. We took away from them our defensive depth by making our defensive block a little bit lower than we normally do. Then we gave the ball to them, to their back three because we wanted them to bring the ball and we wanted them to feel quite comfortable, leaving their comfort zone, which is where they are not playing many matches. Bennett and Morgan, we wanted to take them away from their comfort zone to try to explore the counter attack and fast transitions. So when we scored three goals in the first half, I think the game is over. Then it’s just about being compact and controlling the game, so I’m very happy because it’s a lot of pressure for us. For them too because they have had a phenomenal season and now they are fighting to keep the position that was their position for the whole season and we are fighting until we can and we’ll see in the end.”
