Mourinho scoffs at United title talk
David Moyes, the United manager, insisted his side were still in the hunt but yesterday’s defeat at Stamford Bridge – their seventh in 22 league games – leaves the champions 14 points adrift of leaders Arsenal and 12 behind Mourinho’s side in third.
“I am nobody to say that United are out of the title race,” said the Portuguese. “Maybe if I say that, some people from United would ask who am I to say that. But I don’t think David will be upset if I say the reality: 14 points difference, and 13 and 12 (to the others). Can they recover to one of these teams? They can. But to three of them? It needs three teams to have almost a collapse. What I hope they do is to beat all of them to finish top four.”
Moyes remained defiant despite a miserable afternoon capped by a 90th minute red card for Nemanja Vidic.
Their tally of 37 points is the club’s lowest in the Premier League era and Javier Hernandez’s 78th minute effort provided scant consolation after another difficult afternoon.
“What we won’t do is throw the towel in until we can’t get there,” said Moyes. “The job is to try and finish first. There are no clever answers: the next game. We’d lost one in six before today in the league, and I didn’t think there was a big difference between the teams today. The difference was our defending to set-pieces.”
Asked whether the current plight signalled a crisis at Old Trafford, Moyes added: “Crisis is your word, not my word. The priority is to win the next game, a cup game (the second leg of the Capital One Cup semi-final with Sunderland) in midweek. I’ll try and do what I can there. I was hoping to win more and (be) competing a bit more than we have, but it’ll come.”
Mourinho played down the significance of his 100th victory.
“What it means to me is we won today,” he said. “I don’t care about records, about unbeaten home records... I want to win the next match.”
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