Mourinho has his say on Chelsea's 0-0 draw

If you take a look at the fan reaction to Chelsea's 0-0 draw to Sunderland today, you'll note that it's not ... entirely positive. Too many, I suspect, expect the team to obliterate everyone who stands in their path, but in reality that's simply not going to happen. Perfection is impossible, and we're going to see poor games. Heck, we might even lose. Someday.

Anyway, the manager doesn't seem too cross about what happened, choosing instead to praise Gus Poyet's team for what was a very good display:

Many people like to criticise defensive teams and I don’t do that. To be a good defensive team you need to do it well. We always tried to move the ball and get spaces but they defended very, very well - with a low block, nine guys behind the ball, with the wingers playing as full-backs. I praise them for their success with the clean sheet.

We are not happy with the point but we have to be mature and experienced enough to know in this league every match is difficult. I repeat they were playing for a clean sheet and they were successful. I have no negative words for my players because they tried everything and they weren’t successful. At the end of the day one point for a team that tried and one point for a team that was successful I think is fair.

Source: ChelseaFC.com.

This is probably the right response, and the manager's focus on the next match is exactly what we need. But I do hope that when there's time we can look back on this match and learn some important lessons about what exactly went wrong and how Sunderland managed to stifle us. We'll see this again before the season's out, and we'll simply have to learn to deal with it.

There is no time to be complaining. We move on.

Amen.