“I tried to make him angry,”: United midfielder on his relationship with Jose Mourinho

Manchester United midfielder Nemanja Matic has revealed how he tried to make his club manager Jose Mourinho angry by helping his Serbian national team.

Before the start of the World Cup, Jose Mourinho was asked about his opinions on the outcome of the 2018 World Cup to which he made two very prominent predictions.

The first one being the fact that England have a great chance of lifting the World Cup trophy in Russia this year.




And the second one being Serbia should be knocked out of the tournament pretty early.

No, the United manager did not have any malice against the Serbian nation and he simply wanted his midfielder, Nemanja Matic, to get some much-deserved rest.




Coming out of a tough season and with an even tougher campaign to follow, Jose hoped that Serbia did not pass the group stages so that Matic could go on a vacation and come back fresh before the club’s pre-season.

Mourinho’s dream has come true eventually as Serbia were knocked out of the tournament following their 2-0 loss to Brazil in their final group game.




But Nemanja Matic has gone on to claim that he tried his best to help Serbia progress and in turn anger Jose Mourinho.

Matic said: “I saw that Mourinho said that he wanted me to go home early. I tried to make him angry! I tried to get Serbia to the group stages, but unfortunately, we are out of the World Cup,




“Of course, he wants his players to be fresh for a good pre-season because, as you know, English football is very hard. We have a long championship, we have the Champions League, we have two cup competitions so I understand it, but I gave everything to get us through the group stage.”

Now that the group stages have come to an end, Manchester United have 11 players who have progressed with their team to the knockout stages.




The Red Devils fly out to the USA for their pre-season tour on July 15th and given the number of players still playing in the World Cup, the club have hinted that they will take along a number of youngsters to fill that void.

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