Chelsea manager Jose Mourinho who was clearly agitated following his sides 5-3 loss at White Hart Lane to Tottenham complained that referee Phil Dowd was “too slow.”
It all seems to come from an incident when Chelsea were winning the match 1-0 and the ball hit Spurs defender Jan Vertonghen on the arm and Dowd waved off the penalty appeal from the Chelsea players.
Then later Mourinho was up in arms again when Federico Fazio and Eden Hazard collided, and was still angry later even though Hazard told him he was not fouled.
When asked after the match by BT Sport if he had any complains he said:
“Why do you ask? You know first of all I don’t want to be punished. I want to be here for the next match, so I prefer just to say we lost, tomorrow is another day and Sunday another match and that was all.”
Asked if he still though there was a “campaign” against his team, he added: “That is a question I don’t want to answer.”
The Portuguese manager then went on to speak about his team’s defending before having a go at Dowd.
“I think we made some defensive mistakes, some individual defensive mistakes; it was not easy for my defenders to cope with a good (Nacer) Chadli and especially a good (Harry) Kane. But it was also very difficult for Tottenham defenders to cope with amazing Hazard and a good Diego Costa.
“You can speak about the result, focus on the result and the important moments of the game, and I prefer just to focus on the result because if I focus on the crucial moments of the game you know what I have to say because you have exactly the same opinion as I have. You know at a crucial moment of the game, a result could go for 2-0.”
Asked if he wanted to say more he said: “I don’t.”
But he then carried on talking: “We did (keep at it). (Hugo) Lloris made an amazing save for 4-3, we tried, the players tried a lot. There is an action on Eden Hazard; Hazard honest as always tells me in his opinion it was not a foul or a red card, so that’s good, in spite of Mr Dowd is too slow to go with that ball, he was like 40 yards away, he made the right decision.
“The decision (that) was like 10 metres away, he couldn’t make and that’s a decision that is the crucial moment of the game.”
Mourinho then went on to say: “Every game is unpredictable but there are things in the game that are becoming predictable.”
When asked what he meant, he replied: “Forget it.”
Then with one final comment, Mourinho said: “Of course I hate to lose but again I prefer to lose like I did against Newcastle with a brilliant performance by (referee, Martin) Atkinson, an unlucky performance by us, a lucky performance by Newcastle, but a game where you lose because it’s football, a different feeling.
“We have important Christmas gifts in the last two matches, the gifts that people in love with football don’t like.”
