Jose Mourinho has broken his relatively long streak of media silence to comment on Roma’s new signings, the departed Edin Dzeko, a pre-season review and much more.
Mourinho has been a quiet figure in pre-season, going 40 days without an interview. Now, on the eve of the season starting, he has opened up on a wide range of topics.
In an in-depth conversation with the club’s official channels, the coach discussed their transfer business and how the summer has gone as Roma prepare for a huge season.
With Mourinho at the helm, the hopes will be higher compared to last year. However, it will still be a step-by-step process.
The coach thinks the club are definitely heading in the right direction, though, as his first competitive games in charge approach this week.
To reach this stage, though, several hurdles have already had to be overcome.
“It’s been a very difficult transfer window to navigate and a huge workload for general manager Tiago Pinto, the scouts and, of course, the owners, who’ve had to make some tough decisions,” Mourinho said.
“After all the hard work, the time that we all enjoy is now on the horizon, although I’m a person who always says I don’t like the word ‘friendly’ and that ‘matches are matches’. We’ve all tried to treat this period as a source of motivation for everyone. We’re playing for three points on Sunday against Fiorentina.
“Having said that, it’s even more difficult to play knockout football than it is to play for three points. We’re starting on Thursday in Turkey [in the Europa Conference League against Trabzonspor] and that’s the sort of positive pressure that I want to have and that my players want to have.”
What will hopefully be a long-term project is thus about to get properly underway. Mourinho is on a three-year contract and has already spoken about building for the future.
He reiterated such a theme when claiming he wants to build a team that will remain strong after he leaves – which hopefully won’t be for a while yet.
“We feel that unity as a team and I think that’s very important for us as the coaching staff but also for the club, because I won’t be at Roma one day and when that day comes, we want to leave it as a well-organised structure that’s in a position to further the job that we’ve done.
“We hope, of course, that a Roma without Jose won’t happen anytime soon. We hope it’ll be in many years’ time.”
Embed from Getty ImagesMourinho comes with a firebrand reputation, and there have already been some notable incidents even in friendly games. For example, there was a brawl against Porto and then, in even more calamitous circumstances, Mourinho and three players were sent off against Real Betis.
The Special One looks back on both games with conflicting feelings.
“I really enjoyed the small melee against Porto. In terms of keeping emotions in check, nothing really happened that was worthy of going from a yellow card up to a red card. It was simply a very good and competitive game.
“It was another story against Betis. It’s a story that I feel so many people are responsible for, given the way the match ended. In my opinion, the referee is the first such person and I’m the second because I can’t be the one who provoked what happened afterwards. The team channelled my emotional reaction and we ended up with three or four red cards.
“I repeat that it’s my responsibility, but I’d also like to think the referee got home and thought, ‘What did I do during a decent friendly, in a good game? What did I do for it to end this way?’
“Having said that, I do take responsibility for what happened. The team arrived there very tired. It was the last day and the last game after a three-and-a-half-hour coach journey from Portugal to Seville. It was incredibly hot even though we played in the evening.
Embed from Getty Images“I also can’t forget the [Edin] Dzeko situation because it’s the truth. It was a strange one. There was a feeling that he was going to another club, but there were also doubts: ‘He’s going, someone else is joining or maybe not…’
“I felt the players were more worried about that situation than they were focused on finishing pre-season. I think we played well for 50 or 55 minutes and were very competitive once again. Eldor Shomurodov performed well having arrived just two days earlier. He immediately showed us what sort of player we have, but then it ended badly.
“Maybe that’s also a good thing for us because we then had a day’s rest. When we got back, we analysed everything that went on during the game, from the positives to the negatives, and at the time, I was myself and told to the players in the same way that I’m telling you, ‘I’m responsible for the lack of emotional control that we showed there’.
“Those two weeks in Portugal were, however, very important for us.”
As Mourinho mentioned, Dzeko’s exit from the club caught many by surprise. The manager was long-term admirer of the striker and wanted to work with him.
However, when Inter came calling for the former captain, the often-linked-away Dzeko finally departed last week.
Roma replaced him with Tammy Abraham and Mourinho is happy with how the Friedkins supported him in an unexpected situation.
“First of all, I have to say the general manager and owners have been brilliant. The boss Dan, Ryan and Tiago have all been wonderful. The reality is that we started pre-season thinking that we had Dzeko and what happened was a bit of a surprise for all of us.
“In an incredibly difficult market and in a financial situation that is difficult for every, or more precisely, almost every club, having the willingness, the ambition, the respect for the fans and reacting in this way after losing Dzeko and bringing in Tammy Abraham was a real coup.
Embed from Getty Images“Even if he hadn’t joined, I still would’ve had a positive view of the owners and the general manager, given that they did everything possible to react to the departure of a top player like Dzeko. They’ve been fantastic.
“As for Tammy, I prefer to say wait and see. I say that with total confidence. I’ve known him since he was a boy. He’s never played for me because he was a 14-, 15- and 16-year-old boy when I was at Chelsea, but I know him very well. I know him as a player, a person and in terms of his mentality. I know how he made the decision to leave the Premier League, which is always tough for an English player.
“That tells me so much about him because when you leave the Premier League, you do so because you’re ambitious. You leave because you want to get back into your national team, because you want to play at the World Cup, because you want success outside of England, where not that many English players have had brilliant careers.
“He comes here with that ambition and we hope to see his best qualities as a player. With Tammy, Eldor and Borja [Mayoral], we have attacking options that I’m very pleased about.”
Elsewhere in the market, Roma have signed Rui Patricio, Matias Vina and the aforementioned Shomurodov. Mourinho is content with the club’s work, even though at least two of those transfers were instinctive rather than planned out beforehand.
“The transfer window has ended up being a little different to the window I’d envisaged originally. I’d told the bosses and the general manager what I thought of the team and how I saw this initial stage of ‘my’ Roma. The window has turned out differently, because we lost [Leonardo] Spinazzola for a long time and because we’ve lost Dzeko too.
“The window has changed because initially we’d only thought about one striker, not two, and we’d never considered a left-back.
“That’s how the window has changed. And when it changed, it became more difficult because it went in a direction we’d not planned for – we were prepared to go in another direction. I think the club has done very well. This will be the first and hopefully the last time I say this. I’ll be lacking something based on my thoughts when I assessed the squad initially – I’ll be lacking something. But I can only thank the club for the transfer window they’ve done for us.
“We reacted brilliantly by signing a very good young player in Vina.
“On Rui, I always say that Rui is Rui. He’s played over 100 games with my national team, he’s played in the Premier League for four or five years. Rui is Rui. Rui is stability, Rui is usually about playing, playing, playing with a tremendous degree of consistency.
“Vina is a very good player. When we signed Eldor, we signed him because we needed a bit of mobility, a bit of pace, a bit more mobility in attack.
“We’re super pleased with him. At the end of the day, there’s been an incredible reaction. Perhaps not everyone expected that because this is a really tough market, but if anyone needed a reaction to see what the owners want to do over the three years we’re going to be working together, at the least, that was the reaction.”
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