After Hjulmand lie, Mourinho hits out at Sporting midfielder again | OneFootball

José Mourinho addressed, with irony, the latest statements by Morten Hjulmand, Sporting captain, during the press conference previewing Benfica’s visit to Casa Pia. The Danish midfielder had played down the comments from the 'Special One' about the player’s relationship with referees (data showed the coach was lying). The Benfica manager stressed that the player learned a new language to speak with referees.

"It’s something to think about regarding the next foreign players who might join Benfica next season. Normally, when a player arrives in a foreign country and wants to learn the language, that’s something we praise in Portugal and something I cared about when I worked abroad. But usually the goals are to make social adaptation easier, to do our job better, and to improve relationships with our teammates. Wanting to learn a language in order to communicate better with referees is fantastic".

José Mourinho doubled down on his irony about the situation, making it clear that this could be a kind of “motivation” for future foreign signings: "If a foreign player joins Benfica, that will be our motivation to force him to speak quickly. It’s a fantastic situation".

The coach also commented on the controversial incidents in the match between Sporting and Santa Clara, which ended 4-2: "I saw the newspaper front pages and thought, 'nothing happened'. They are beautiful pages with a kid [Rafael Nel] who scored, but they make anyone who didn’t watch the game think nothing happened. I don’t really know what to say".

Despite José Mourinho’s criticism of the refereeing in the lions’ match against Santa Clara, Jorge Faustino, Marco Ferreira and Pedro Henriques had no doubts that the penalty for the Alvalade club and the disallowed goal for the Azorean side were correctly judged.

This article was translated into English by Artificial Intelligence. You can read the original version in 🇵🇹 here.