Mourinho: “It was like Formula 1 against Formula 3”

Daniel Storey

Jose Mourinho says he was not surprised by Manchester United’s 4-1 defeat to Borussia Dortmund.

United were sloppy in defence and ineffective in attack during the defeat, but Mourinho was not flustered.

Dortmund are further along in their pre-season training, and United’s manager believes that was the reason for the gulf in quality.

“I think in pre-season the team that wins is always the team that is in an advanced stage of the preparation,” Mourinho told MUTV.

“Always. Never the best team, always the team that is in advance. It was too obvious.”

“It was like Formula 1 against Formula 3. They are much sharper, so it was difficult to judge.

“The team with four matches in their legs against the team with one match. The team working a lot of months against us with a maximum of 15 days, some of them arrived three or four days ago. There was a huge difference in preparation.

“Nobody likes to lose. We’re not happy with that but happy with the 90 minutes we have in our legs. It was very important to compete in difficult circumstances with the weather and the opponents and that was good for us.”

“At the moment, I’m not even creating a team,” he stressed. “So many players are not here. We’re creating individuals’ form and trying to bring these players to a good condition. For the new signings and all of the players, they had a chance to play 45, 70 or 90 minutes. It’s very, very important and I can imagine it will take a long time to recover from this effort in the game. In this weather, in reality, at this stage of pre-season for them individually it’s good.”