Mourinho: Unshakable belief

Jose Mourinho says there is room for improvement from his Chelsea side but there is also space in the calendar for that to be achieved.

The Champions League exit midweek brought disappointment to Stamford Bridge but it also simplified the rest of the season down to a straight 11 league games left, six at home and five away, with the target of maintaining our lead at the top of the table.

Theories abound outside the club for why we could not beat Paris Saint-Germain

and why the team is recently scoring at a rate lower than at previous times this season, but Mourinho explains the answer doesn’t revolve around the form of one single player or one incident.

‘We need to improve and we are going to have time to work,’ says our manager.

‘We have only one week left with three games, when we play Arsenal, Leicester and Crystal Palace, and apart from that we have one week before every game, one week to work on the things we couldn’t during the first part of the season.

‘The last few matches we did not score a lot of goals like we were doing at the beginning of the season but this not due to Cesc Fabregas, this is not due to Diego Costa, this is an accumulation of circumstances that can happen during the season.

‘We lost Nemanja Matic suspended with five yellow cards and he didn’t play at Newcastle, and then we lost Fabregas to a one-match suspension with five yellow cards. Then we lost Diego Costa with suspension for three games after the Liverpool game, then we lost Fabregas for three matches when he was injured against Liverpool. Then we lost Matic to suspension after Burnley.

‘But this is a season,’ he quickly added. ‘I would not expect the same team to play the first game [of the season] at Burnley and then play the last game without there being interruptions.

‘Suspensions are normal, injuries are normal, form goes up and down and it is normal to have muscular injuries and they are injuries I don’t like. Players come back after a break, not injured anymore but afraid to sprint, afraid to shoot and afraid of high intensity despite us working very well on the transitional period between them being injured and not injured.

‘So it is normal we lost a little bit of our fluidity and our confidence, so our numbers in terms of goals and situations we create went down.’

The half-hour meeting that took place in the aftermath of Wednesday’s defeat involved the sharing of points of view that differed depending on position on the pitch and involvement in the game, and then that chapter of the season, as Mourinho describes it, was closed and a second meeting took place when only this weekend’s game against Southampton was discussed.

The manager will make two, three or four changes at the maximum to the team line-up and that will be to rest players or to try to play a different way, not to punish anyone for not producing against PSG.

‘I have the same belief in the players, that is unshakeable,’ Mourinho says.

‘One thing is to be disappointed and one thing is to find the reasons why we didn’t succeed in this game, another thing is to lose belief in these players. These are the same players who have been top of the league since day one and had zero defeats in the Champions League.

‘We still have the book to write, we have 11 more matches to finish the book and let’s see if the last page of the book is readable.

‘We are a team that wants to win the Premier League and I think our answer is going to be good. I really believe that we are going to win.’