The Manchester United manager has always demanded a level of athletic masochism from his players and it has been a strength of his sides’ success but it remains to be seen whether it will be at Old Trafford
“I do not like talking about injured players,” José Mourinho announced a few months before he left Real Madrid – shortly before going on to talk, rather darkly, about assorted injured players and provide in the process another in a series of similar digressions through the sullen, dying autumn of his time at the Bernabéu.
In reality of course the opposite is true. Mourinho loves talking about injured players. Or at least he certainly spends a lot of time doing it. Some may see an odd coincidence in the fact Mourinho’s comments about Luke Shaw and Chris Smalling refusing to play through injury should come almost exactly a year to the day after Mourinho was sued by the doctor at his previous club, who treated an (apparently) injured player against his wishes; or almost exactly two years to the day since Mourinho used a press conference to mock Sergio Ramos’s lack of a medical degree in another migrainously tedious row over the exact limits of injury and fitness; or almost exactly three years after Mourinho could be heard describing Oscar as “a fragile boy” who lacks “physical ability” just after his best performance to date in England.
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