🚨 Jose Mourinho on Nicolas Jackson scoring twice against Manchester City:
“Yes, I watched Nicolas Jackson against Manchester City, and I have to say, I enjoyed it.
Not only because of the goals.
I enjoyed watching the reactions afterwards.
Football is a very interesting business. A player misses chances, everybody says he cannot finish. He leaves the club, starts scoring, and suddenly everybody wants to explain why he was misunderstood.
I have seen this many times.
What I liked about Jackson’s first goal was the determination. He saw the opportunity and attacked it. The defender was there, but Nicolas had already made his decision.
For the second goal, he didn’t need to do very much. He received the ball outside the area and struck it low.
Two different goals.
That is what you want from a striker
And against Manchester City, not against some small team in a friendly match.
I remember watching the second goal and thinking about the Chelsea supporters.
Because they know this player very well.
Some of them spent a long time complaining about him.
Now he’s scoring twice against Manchester City for Aston Villa.
Imagine being a Chelsea supporter, watching your former striker score those goals, and then having to listen to people explain that he was never good enough.
Maybe he wasn’t good enough for what they wanted at that moment. Fine.
But football doesn’t stop because a club decides a player is finished.
Sometimes the player goes somewhere else, finds a manager who understands him, gets the confidence he needs and becomes a different player.
This is why I don’t like people making final judgments about young strikers.
At Chelsea, I had Didier Drogba. People remember the great Drogba now. But when he first arrived, not everybody understood what he could become.
You need patience. You need trust.
And sometimes you need a manager who doesn’t panic because a striker misses a chance.
Unai Emery has given Jackson a responsibility, and the player is responding.
Now, Manchester City also have a responsibility.
They spend a lot of money building teams to win the biggest trophies. They have very good defenders, very good players, a very good goalkeeper.
And today, Nicolas Jackson has scored twice against them.
I don’t think they were expecting to become part of his redemption story.
But that’s football.
And I imagine there are some people who would prefer that his second goal had gone wide.
Unfortunately for them, it didn’t.”
[ This is the source @ChinoUTD ]