Mourinho: “Nothing worked”

Andrea Belotti said personality was lacking. What do you think was lacking?

“Everything. I don’t want to talk much. The players' decision not to talk to the media was my decision. Belotti spoke because it was straight after the game. No one should speak because there’s not much more to say other than what I have to say. Slavia Prague really deserved that result, in a positive way, and we really deserved it too, in a negative way.

“I didn’t like anything. I’ve already spoken to the players in the changing room. I don’t normally do that because I get so much adrenaline from being on the sideline but the fact that I watched it from above, far away from the pitch, gave me a different type of tranquillity that allowed me to go and talk to the players.

“What I said stays between us. I only want to be honest with the Slavia players, who deserved to win 2-0.”

Was there something that didn’t work tactically?

“Nothing worked. In the first game we played against them, they played very similarly to how they did today, and we’d prepared our game plan in a very similar way. The fact that [Nicola] Zalewski wasn’t able to play, and El Shaarawy played as a wing-back with Belotti up top on the left, could be used as an excuse. But we were so bad that I don’t want to.

“Nothing worked. In terms of individuals, very few of the players had the right attitude, the professional attitude I demand. Lots of the players had the wrong attitude for a serious game where there were goals to achieve.

“I’m disappointed. I don’t want to talk anymore because I’ve already done my analysis with the players, and I’ll do it tomorrow.”

Does a performance like this make it harder to prepare for the derby?

“They're two completely different situations. I like to separate things. Of course when you have players who are struggling a bit, you try to think about the next game, as we did with Paulo [Dybala] and Bryan [Cristante]. But that doesn't mean this wasn't the most important match.

“We weren't poor today; we were awful. Ok, we had a positive reaction and we might have got it back to 1-1 – at that point of the match we looked more positive. But we deserve to suffer this defeat.”

Did you expect these difficulties while you were preparing for the game?

“Yes, we did. That's why we prepared for it as best we could with all our limits, leaving out Paulo and Bryan. But today the best player in our team – the only one I really liked because he gave everything technically, tactically and mentally – was a 20-year-old kid who wasn't even in the first team two years ago.

“We had one player who played with legs, body and mind – just one. When you have 11 players on the pitch and only one like that, you can't win. The only player who didn't deserve to lose was [Edoardo] Bove. Everyone else, myself included, deserved to lose.”