Chelsea boss Jose Mourinho admits he has to only play his first-team if he hopes to win the league after a team comprised of many of the Blues fringe players got knocked out of the FA Cup by Bradford 4-2 on Saturday, inflicting the Blues manager his heaviest loss at home as a Chelsea manager.
“It is easy for you to understand now why I play almost every game with the same players,” said Mourinho.
“I don’t make many changes, I try to keep stability in the team.
“Maybe now you can understand a bit better why, I don’t want to speak too much about it.
“I blame myself the same as the players. We should share the blame between us. But if I am the boss, and the boss has more responsibilities.
“At half-time it was 2-1 and we spoke about the danger of the situation. But the players thought, ‘We are going to score, not them’.
“When they scored for 2-2, after that the game became crazy.”
Mourinho is hoping to add Fiorentina winger Juan Cuadrado to his team in January, but knows he must sell in order to do this with Andre Schurrle likely to join Wolfsburg and Mohamed Salah to move to AS Rome.
Mourinho added: “This is Chelsea always thinking and being proud of thinking of numbers and Financial Fair Play and so on.
“We cannot now go to the market and spend money – I am completely with the club, I share this idea.
“I don’t think we are going to the market, unless someone makes a market with us.”
The Blues boss must now think before giving any of his A-team a rest for the Capital One Cup tie second-leg with Liverpool Tuesday night, even though he knows they have a six-point match with fellow title contenders Manchester City on Saturday.
Mourinho also insisted he has no regrets about resting Captain John Terry against Bradford even though the Blues conceded four goals adding: “We played lots of games without John, almost every Cup game.
“We played Bolton, Shrewsbury and Watford without John and the team coped well with the situation.”
