Mourinho blames Tottenham players for inability to beat Fulham

JOSE Mourinho has blamed his Tottenham Hotspur players for their inability to beat Fulham at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium on Wednesday night.

Spurs took the lead in the first half with Harry Kane’s fine header, his 11th Premier League goal of the season, but Fulham largely dominated the second half and got their just reward with Ivan Cavaleiro scoring off a superb Ademola Lookman assist.

A win over promoted Fulham would have taken Tottenham Hotspur to third place in the Premier League but the 1-1 home draw left them in sixth, six points off leaders Manchester United.And Mourinho was unhappy with his players for dropping two valuable points.

“I think there are things that have to be with the characteristics of players. There are things that are difficult too,” the Portuguese coach said during his post-match interview.

“There are some things they have to do with organisation of the team, but other things they have to do with individual skills, individual ability, and its as simple as that.”

The draw meant Spurs have dropped 10 points from winning positions this season, with only Brighton (12 points) and Sheffield United (11 points) dropping more after leading, and Mourinho felt his side should have put in more effort.

“(The performance was) not good enough, but good enough to win,” he said.

“Not good enough because I think we have to play better in a more consistent way, but good enough to create four or five big chances, good enough to give (goalkeeper) Hugo (Lloris) a very quiet evening.

“Good enough to win the game but not good enough because we have to play better than we did.”

The former Chelsea and Manchester United manager then acknowledged that Fulham have improved from the team that started the season with a 3-0 home defeat to Arsenal.

He explained: “I knew, they started the Premier League in a way where they were intelligent enough that that way they would be relegated.

“They changed, they adopted a different way to play football, a different way to organise as a team and since then they are getting good results which I always thought I was expecting a difficult match.

“Fulham had just two days to prepare for the match after the original fixture was postponed due to a COVID-19 outbreak in their camp. Manager Scott Parker complained about the sudden announcement of the new date but Mourinho felt Fulham had no disadvantages.

“Look, I truly believe, I have to believe and I know the top hierarchy at Fulham Football Club and we’re dealing with honest people and of course they had problems,” he noted.

“Of course the reason why we didn’t play the game when we should, there were reasons for that. Let’s put that very, very, very clear.

“The reason why they were not happy to play today is a different question you have to ask Scott not me. But in the football world it’s very difficult to keep secrets.

“Somebody tells somebody who tells somebody who tells somebody and it arrives to somebody else. And of course we knew for a few days that they were ready and had the players to come.

“Mitrovic is not a Covid situation, [he] had a small injury from the last match. We knew that so it’s something you have to ask Scott. But make things very, very clear.

“Of course they had problems and of course there was a reason for them not to play the game a couple of weeks ago.”

Apart from Fulham, Spurs have failed to win after taking 1-0 leads against Newcastle United, Crystal Palace and Wolverhampton Wanderers, a trend that worries Mourinho

.”Look but I understand that in the first half we had chances to kill the game,” he said.

“Some of them are (Fulham goalkeeper) Areola’s responsibility. In the second half we had the biggest chance to kill the game but when you don’t do it you cannot concede goals the way we did do it.

“This is the same story basically since the beginning of the season. We can talk about not killing the game yes, we can speak about that, and today was a clear situation where we could and should have killed the game in the first half but then you go back to the goals that we concede and it’s not also easy to assimilate that”.

Tottenham Hotspur were on top of the table in early December but have slipped down since, winning only two of the last eight league matches.