Jose Mourinho left Mohamed Salah in tears after ripping into him at Chelsea claims John Obi Mikel
Jose Mourinho once left Mohamed Salah in tears at Chelsea after berating the Egyptian over a poor performance and taking him off at half time, claims John Obi Mikel.
Salah spent two-and-a-half years with the Blues after completing an £11million move from Basel in January 2014, yet the majority of that time was spent out on loan after a difficult first half-season under Mourinho.
Despite getting on the scoresheet twice in his first five league appearances, the now-Liverpool star produced a string of below-par displays and therefore fell out of favour, meaning he was sent out on loan to Fiorentina and Roma for the final two years of his stint in west London.
And Mikel has revealed that Salah felt the full wrath of Mourinho during a ‘bad game’ for Chelsea, which left him visibly emotional in the dressing room.
The former Blues midfielder said on Dubai Eye: ‘I think [Salah] was having a bad game and then obviously Mourinho came in and ripped into him, massively ripped into him,’ he said.
When asked if he ever expected Salah to go on and become a top player, Mikel said: ‘No. He was in tears, and what happened is [Mourinho] didn’t let him back onto the pitch in the second half. He took him off.
‘It would have been easy to just take him off and say “you’re not playing well, off you go, sit down, you’re not going back onto the pitch.” But he ripped into him and took him off.’
Salah has since gone on to become one of the best players in world football at Liverpool, scoring 174 goals in 286 games for the Reds while winning the Premier League, Champions League, FA Cup and League Cup.
In his debut campaign at Anfield he took the Premier League by storm, setting a top-flight record for the most goals in a 38-game season with an astonishing 32.
The 30-year-old is not the only world-class talent Chelsea have let slip through their fingers in recent years, nevertheless, with Manchester City maestro Kevin de Bruyne also offloaded by Mourinho and Co in the same month Salah joined.
Mikel recalled: ‘Kevin was always a stroppy guy, he was always on his own, he was always moody, he was always grumpy. You could never get anything out of him.
‘But now when I watch him play… what a joy. What a joy to watch.’
When asked if both men’s disappointing experience at Chelsea was the making of them, he continued: ‘I think so when I look at it. You can also say with [Romelu] Lukaku as well, he went to Inter Milan but he went back and it didn’t work out.
‘But when I look at the likes of Kevin de Bruyne and Mo Salah, what they’ve become now, the best players in the world, it’s amazing to see. They’ve become physically stronger, they’ve become faster. I don’t know what happened to them!’
