After lying about Hjulmand, Mourinho hits out at Sporting man again | OneFootball

José Mourinho addressed, with irony, the latest remarks by Morten Hjulmand, captain of Sporting, during the press conference previewing Benfica’s visit to Casa Pia. The Danish midfielder had played down the ‘Special One’s’ comments about the player’s relationship with referees (data showed the coach had lied). The Benfica manager stressed that the player learned a new language in order 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 is 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 make relationships with our teammates easier. 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 any foreign player arrives at Benfica, that will be our motivation for pushing 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 that 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 awarded to the Alvalade club and the goal disallowed for the Azoreans were correctly judged.

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