“In the second half we played much better, really well”, he said.
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“But this first half, I can rate as one of those performances, yes”. It was that bad.
Mourinho claimed that he told his players he was sorry that he only had three substitutions available because he wanted to make six, as per the Evening Standard.
“There were too many individual performances that were terrible”. The Blues fell two goals behind the Magpies before they mounted a miracle comeback with a 79th minute strike from Ramires and a late free kick from substitute Willian.
“Newcastle could not cope with it”.
“In the first half, from 0 to 10, we were minus one“.
“I would have liked to make more changes than I did, but the ones I did were enough to improve the team and get us a point”.
Despite having just under four minutes plus stoppage time to complete the turnaround on an unlikely win, Mourinho did not feel his side could win the game because of referee Martin Atkinson’s style of officiating. I don’t know. John has to behave like the captain he is and wait for the decision he wants’. They were rocked back for an hour at St James’ Park, by which time they trailed Newcastle by two goals.
He refused to name individuals when he said he would no longer tolerate the contribution of certain players, but he did not have to. I was surprised with the quality of their play.
He added: “I am both relieved and disappointed”.
The Magpies went into the game reeling from their humiliating midweek League Cup defeat by second-tier Sheffield Wednesday.
“We are a young side, but we have many, many qualities in the squad and we can win against any team”.
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After the match, Mourinho rated his team’s performance to start the match a “minus-one out of ten”, and wasn’t sure how a team could play so poorly and then turn things around so quickly. They don’t, but this is their problem.
