Is Jose Mourinho Wrong to Criticize His Strikers at Chelsea?

It never really sits well when managers start criticising their own players in public.

You need only to look at the situation Tim Sherwood now finds himself in at Spurs, following his outburst a few weeks ago. Recent results have not been good.

Whilst you cannot really be comparing a manager like Sherwood to a man like Jose Mourinho, it's still incredibly rare for an open declaration of unhappiness in your own players to end that well for anyone.

The Chelsea manager, though, is someone who pretty much says and does whatever he likes these days, and after their 3-1 defeat at the hands of Paris Saint-Germain on Wednesday night, Mourinho, clearly feeling as though honesty was the best policy, decided to do just that.  

"I'm not happy with my strikers' performances, so I have to try things," The Special One said, according to ITV.

"With Andre [Schurrle] at least I know we have one more player to have the ball, we have one more player to associate with the other players. Football is also about scoring goals. That is for strikers, for real strikers. I had to try."

Scathing? Yes. Helpful? probably not.

Mourinho is clearly looking to go out to find a new striker in the summer in order to build toward next season, as Sheridan Bird of Mirror Football notes, but it is hard to see how such a damning indictment of his offensive options will benefit the team for the climax of this campaign. That's especially the case considering it is looking more and more likely by the game that Chelsea will end this season silverwareless.

It is always worth remembering that managers at Stamford Bridge have been sacked for a lot less.

Fernando Torres is a confidence player (to be fair they all are) playing who hasn't played with any confidence in years. This isn't exactly going to help matters. If anyone had the ability to coax the best back out of him, it was Mourinho.

Clearly though, the Spaniard is now completely a lost cause. He'll surely be out the door in the summer, if there's anyone out there daft enough to take him. Mourinho's latest comments will only serve to push him further into the mire. To be fair, though, it looks increasingly unlikely that Torres will ever be out of the mire again. 

Elsewhere, Samuel Eto'o has probably done as much, if not more, than anyone could have expected of him when he was first brought in. Most wrote him off as a man who had won pretty much everything (in most cases, twice) and no longer had any real interest in performing at the highest level. But, to be fair to him, he has scored goals and applied himself extremely well—if only at home. 

Then, there is Demba Ba, who never really looked like a Chelsea player from the start and hasn't really been given too much of a chance to prove otherwise. 

Maybe Mourinho is determined not to win anything this season. After all, he has stated on more than one occasion in the last few weeks that his side's title chances are over. Maybe he just doesn't want to be proven wrong? (Unlikely, I know.)

Overall, though, it did seem extremely harsh for him to criticize his strikers so severely off of the back of a game in which none of them even started. 

You also have to wonder how fair it is for Mourinho to really aim that kind of criticism at his attacking options.  

He has let two windows (in which he has spent plenty of money) come and go without properly addressing the issue, and some might even argue that his best striker is currently plying his trade at Everton. 

The Portuguese manager is clearly yet to be convinced by Romelu Lukaku. If he did feel he had what it took to lead the line for Chelsea, especially taking into account the disregard in which he holds his other options, then he would currently be at Chelsea.

Moves will be made soon, and it's difficult to imagine that Roman Abramovich's piggy bank won't be smashed open over the course of this summer—and by that time, it will have been a decade since Chelsea last bought a genuinely successful striker. 

Too much of his time in the last two windows has been spent batting his eyelids at Wayne Rooney, via Sami Mokbel of the Mail Online, rather than aiming for real targets, and Mourinho has what he has available to him because of his choices alone. 

Until he rectifies the situation himself, it is unfair for him to aim such levels of criticism at the strikers currently at his disposal. It is, after all, only he and Chelsea that will suffer for it between now and the end of the season.