Jose Mourinho’s Roma returned to work on Monday and travel to the Algarve this Thursday for a new pre-season of sorts before returning to competition in Italy. During this week-long period, Roma will play Cadiz, Casa Pia and Waalwijk in private matches.
Speaking to club media, José Mourinho talked about Casa Pia.
“The Portugal team we will face [Casa Pia] ranked fifth in the league, but more importantly, they have been playing competitively for two days now. The World Cup stopped the championship, but the League Cup was played in Portugal. Casa Pia was in a group with three other teams and the games were played on short notice. This is another team that is competitively ahead of us at the moment,” he commented.
The Portuguese coach also explained the choice of the other two sets, Cadiz and Wahlwijk: “Our goal is to get back in the game. There are a lot of teams out there, so we had a lot of options to choose from. It is not always easy for us to find a suitable opponent. Our idea was to face teams that would be in better shape than us. Cadiz has not rested yet. During this period they played and trained against big teams such as Manchester United and still [quarta-feira] played against Wolverhampton. They are in the south of Spain, that is, on the way to Portugal. It can be seen that they played without taking their feet off the accelerator pedal, and the players have not had a break so far. The other team we will face is the Dutch Wahlwijk. They’re back in the league first than we are. And that’s why I chose the commands that I said here. We want players to have more minutes of play.”
