Troy Parrott, once publicly criticised by Jos\u00e9 Mourinho at Tottenham Hotspur, ended up scoring the goal that handed the Portuguese coach his first Real Madrid defeat of his second spell.<\/p>\n
It was a sharp twist in a story that had been building for more than six years. Mourinho\u2019s long, combustible career has produced plenty of memorable lines, and this one returned to shadow him when Parrott delivered on the pitch.<\/p>\n
The roots of the episode go back to March 2020, when Tottenham had no fit senior striker but did have Parrott impressing for the U-23s. The young forward had already become a favourite with supporters, who were chanting for the then-21-year-old despite his limited Premier League experience.<\/p>\n
Mourinho dismissed that outside noise with a pointed assessment of how little some people knew about the player. \u201cThis is a world where lots of people, they don\u2019t even know if Troy has long hair or short hair. Or is blonde or is dark,\u201d Mourinho scoffed. \u201cThey don\u2019t even know that and speak about: Troy, Troy, Troy, Troy, he should play. There was a guy behind me on the bench the other day: \u2018Play Troy, play Troy.\u2019 I don\u2019t think he knows Troy.\u201d<\/p>\n
His criticism was aimed less at Parrott\u2019s ability than at his attitude. \u201cEvery time he was playing with the kids, he was playing with the mentality of, \u2018I shouldn\u2019t be here\u2019 or \u2018I am too good to be here\u2019 or \u2018It\u2019s not here that I want to play,\u2019\u201d the former Spurs coach said. \u201cAnd this is an educational process that comes. I have no problem to say because I know that he will confirm.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cTroy cannot go there [the under-age teams] with discontent, contempt. It is a process,\u201d Mourinho added.<\/p>\n
Parrott did feature against Norwich City in the FA Cup later that month, only to miss his penalty in a shootout defeat that was described as humiliating. He never played another senior match under Mourinho.<\/p>\n
A few months later, the Republic of Ireland international joined Millwall on loan and later accepted the criticism in full. \u201cTo be fair, he\u2019s such an experienced manager and he’s done nearly everything in the game, so if he feels like that\u2019s right then there must be some truth in it and I had to take it on the chin,\u201d Parrott explained.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Parrott answered Mourinho\u2019s old criticism by scoring against Real Madrid after six years.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":19166,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[987,187],"tags":[180,182],"class_list":["post-19167","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-real-madrid","category-tottenham-hotspur","tag-player-news","tag-transfers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19167","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19167"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19167\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19166"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19167"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19167"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19167"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}