Manchester United vs Leicester: Jose Mourinho defends his right to publicly criticise his own players

Manchester United manager Jose Mourinho has issued a robust defence of his decision to criticise his own players in pubic, insisting that they have to be tough enough to deal with it if they are to succeed.

Players on the receiving end from Mourinho in the past few weeks have included Jesse Lingard, Henrikh Mkhitaryan and Luke Shaw, who had just sustained a calf injury when he made an error, but the manager said that they had to take public negativity from him.

“The critique is part of the evolution,” he said. “The critique is part of the process. The critique helps people to learn how to cope with critics. It’s their life. From you, they cannot expect other thing than be ready to smash them when they have periods of not so much success.

“It’s a learning process. You make a mistake, especially the kind of individual mistake, you have to learn with what that means for the team. [You] try to have a game plan, try to identify some defensive and attacking agreements between all of us, then in the game the individual mistake you can be punished by that.”

Mourinho looked like a manager who has been stung by recent criticism of his United team. He opened his press conference by ignoring a question about Saturday’s opponents Leicester City and saying sarcastically: "First of all, good morning to my friends from the media.”

He insisted that he had not been “upset” by criticism of the side which lost three times last week but returned to his theme, aired on an interview by the club’s in-house TV station, that his critics were “Einsteins.”

"I think it's a feeling of frustration, but with me it's fine and with the Einsteins it's fine,” he said. "The Einsteins need money to live, they can't coach, they can't sit on the bench, they can't win matches. They can speak, they can write, they can criticise the work of other people, but I am a good man. I am good man of goodwill. I do lots of charity, I help so many people, so why not also feed the Einsteins? That's fine. I am (not) upset with anything. I am such a lucky guy that I cannot be upset with anything. I am upset with nothing.”

Mourinho said that Anthony Martial would not be fit to face Leicester on Saturday lunchtime because he had a contusion in his “calf an ankle area.”

He admitted that he form of his captain Wayne Rooney – who has described criticism of himself as “rubbish” - had been patchy. “Wayne Rooney’s form is like Man United form,” Mourinho said. “We are a team. We are not Wayne Rooney, we are a team. we all started well. We all won 4 matches. We all lost 3 matches in a week.”

It was an article of faith for Sir Alex Ferguson not to criticise his players in public. “After a game I would always try to avoid criticising the players,” he said after he had retired. “They had enough pressure, without me piling it on in public. I save my criticism for the private sessions away from prying eyes. I tried to employ heat shields to deflect criticism from a player who had misplaced a pass that gave away a goal, or another who had missed a sitter that could have won us a game.”