Chelsea manager Jose Mourinho has stated that his side will have to work hard to qualify for next season’s Champions League and that finishing fourth would be a dream.
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The 24-year-old has impressed since a summer move from Caen with the Foxes top of the Barclays Premier League.
Watford’s success in blending a handful of proven top level performers with the players who secured their promotion to the top division of English football has been one of the most compelling storylines of this season so far, with the Hornets’ first target of survival very much in reach.
Mourinho’s men will have to break all kinds of records to make the top four this season but in their favor is the fact that no team (apart from Leicester) really seems able to string together four or five wins on the trot.
Last week’s home defeat to Bournemouth was an eighth in 15 league games for the defending champions, but Mourinho believes he has solved the defensive problems which saw his side ship three goals to Everton, Southampton and Liverpool earlier in the season.
This will be good news to Blues fans as they will be hoping to see the club build on their impressive 2-0 win over Dynamo Kiev in the Champions League on Wednesday. “The thing that I’m more happy with apart from the result is the players accepted the challenge of playing to win, even though we only needed a draw”, Mourinho said.
“I haven’t heard my players talking about where we can finish and what is possible”.
“Before we lost the last three points against Bournemouth (last week), I was convinced of fourth, of a great December for us”.
“It’s not easy for the top clubs any more to win three, four, five, 10 matches in a row”.
‘One thing is to be top of the league in September after a lovely start. Chelsea won it before and we will try to do it again.
The managers have had a rocky relationship in the past and clashed while Ranieri was at Roma and Mourinho was Inter Milan boss in 2010. “They’re not in the best of form at the moment and they should be doing a lot better”, Morgan told the club’s official website.
Mourinho has a fully-fit squad to choose from, while Matty James and Ritchie De Laet (ankle) are Leicester’s only absentees, the former having made his return from a cruciate ligament injury in last week’s Under-21s defeat to Villarreal. “I completely trust him”, the Portuguese manager explained.
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“Every minute he’s on the pitch the commitment is there, the professionalism is there”, Mourinho said.
