Jose Mourinho gets off the hook on Paulo Dybala’s injury

The words of Jose Mourinho

José Mourinho spoke after the victory with Lecce. “I don’t remember so many games in my career that I played 11 against 10 and wanted it to end right away. There is fatigue, physical and mental. Playing Thursday and then Sunday is hard. Today I saw Udinese-Atalanta, you can see they are teams that play once a week. This is not a justification. We started the game well, with good aggression. When they were down to 10 it became more difficult because we managed badly. When you are tired you can’t play simple. There was no fear, but we were complicating things. We were one up and we had to exploit that. We were making long throws and losing the ball. Too many touches of the ball, I didn’t like how we handled the ball. They waited until the last 5-10 minutes to take a chance with the score wide open. We had chances to score 3-1 but it could have also happened that they found the equalizer. Against Atalanta we played well but lost, today we played badly but won. A draw today would have been a disaster. Fatigue is important, but you have to manage it better than we did.”

Keeping the spotlight, however, is Paulo Dybala’s condition: “How is he? I say bad not to say very very bad. Seeing him again before 2023? I’m not a doctor, I haven’t spoken to a doctor, but I can say it’s difficult.”