Chelsea boss Jose Mourinho recently spoke to the media once again, in his pre-match press conference on Friday. The Portuguese manager talked about the return of one of his players from injury and further spoke about serving the one match stadium ban at Stoke. The Blues’ main man stated that right-back Branislav Ivanovic will be fit and available for the clash against the Potteries since straining a thigh muscle on international duty last month.
Now, it seems only keeper Thibaut Courtois and Falcao are out, with injuries and will be unavailable for a few weeks at least. Further, the Portuguese boss added that there would be no appeal against his suspension that he has been given for tomorrow’s game.
He told reporters at Cobham, “Because the match is tomorrow and because I know the result of that appeal already, I decided to give up. I think it is stupid to fight a fight you know you already lose. I will travel with the team and I will be with them until we reach the limit of the stadium facilities. We know when I have to stop being with the players. We will come back from Stoke together.”
Further, talking about the game and how things will work out, he added, “My assistants are completely free of that extra pressure which doesn’t belong to their jobs. I choose the team and I predict to the maximum I can the different aspects of the game and the different directions it can follow. I try to prepare the players and assistants even better than ever because it is only the way. If after 10 minutes we are playing with seven men, it is something I did not prepare my assistants for, so they have to decide for themselves. The game is unpredictable, but we try to reduce the impact from extreme scenarios you can imagine such as winning 4-0 at half-time to losing 4-0 at half-time, and between those you have 1000 options including injuries and red cards to each player. We went through all these different scenarios and they are prepared and, importantly, protected by the fact it is my responsibility.You can imagine how I feel and I don’t want to speak a lot about it. It is one thing not to be on the bench like against West Ham when the ref told me not to be on the bench in the second half, but nobody told me to leave the stadium. This time, the referee invited me to go to the dressing room and tell him what I thought about the first half. If I speak about the dimension of the punishment, I think it opens up a range of situations and I can imagine in the future we are going to have lots of managers with stadium bans. The bans should be related to something really serious in terms of aggression and words I don’t want to use, and this stadium ban is connected to words and complaints. Now it is open to bans happening many more times unless maybe our [managers’] association and other associations around Europe question in a very serious and legal way the rights of the managers having stadium bans. But from my point of view I want to be out of it, let the game tomorrow finish and that is it.“