Jose Mourinho has said he wants to see greater consistency from Paul Pogba, even if he doesn't expect him to match last week's he...
Jose Mourinho has said he wants to see greater consistency from Paul Pogba, even if he doesn't expect him to match last week's heroic performance against Manchester City every game.
After spending time on the bench in March, Pogba scored twice in the second half to help United rally to a 3-2 win and deny City the title for the time being.
And ahead of Sunday's game against West Brom, Mourinho challenged Pogba to erase the occasional substandard performance from his repertoire.
"I'll tell you what I told him after the match," Mourinho told multiple national newspapers. "I don't expect you to be man of the match every week, I don't expect you to score two goals every week. But I expect you to be consistent.
"So, if you ask me if I'm expecting Paul now to be man of the match every week? No. If I expect him to score goals every match? No.
"But I expect Paul -- and I think that's the challenge he has to put to himself -- to keep a certain stability and not to have the good match and the so-so match and the bad match.
"I think he has to try to keep that level of stability, and from that stability of course will appear the special match with the special performance like it happened against City."
Pogba wasn't the only one Mourinho wants to be more stable, as he also told his critics to support him and his team after good performances just as readily as they bash United after poor ones.
"If you ask me about respect, I say it is about honesty," he said. "When we play bad then, yes, tell the truth. But when we do something positive, then also tell the truth.
"We are a team that has beaten every other team in the Premier League -- beaten every one of the top six. We are a team that in the last three matches [against] Chelsea, Liverpool and Manchester City, has won all of them.
"We are a team that has already more points than last season, a team that's had brilliant matches and a team that showed character many times. Last week we were 2-0 down against City and we changed the game to win 3-2.
"After we lost to Sevilla in the Champions League, only a good group with good people could do what we did by winning every single match.
"The easy thing would have been to out against Sevilla and then collapse in the Premier League, in the sense that motivation goes down and the quality goes down. I think that we have given proof of what this group is -- it is a group of good guys."
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