‘The least he could do’ – Jose Mourinho says Scott McTominay owed him his Napoli shirt

Jose Mourinho had a particularly amusing response to a gift from Scott McTominay.

Benfica beat Napoli 2-0 in the Champions League to continue Antonio Conte’s dreadful record in the competition.

Mourinho was reunited with one of his former Manchester United players, McTominay, who broke through during his troubled time at Old Trafford.

The Scot is now one of the best players in the world, and Mourinho felt he deserved some credit when asked about McTominay giving him his shirt post-match.

“I’m the one who put him in there,” the Benfica coach said with a cheeky grin.

“I’m the one who left Paul Pogba at home to put him in there. The least he could do was give me the jersey.”

Explaining how he shut McTominay out of the match, he added: “These are choices that have a lot of thought behind them, a lot of analysis.

“We thought that, against a player who provides depth, who is very fast, who is very powerful, that our fastest player, Tomás [Araújo], should be on the field.

“And, on the other hand, against a team that wants to defend man-to-man and wants to press the midfielders, instead of having a player as technical as Pavlidis, it was better to have a player who sought depth and who sought to break down a very compact team.

“Today, they [the players] were responsible for me making the right decision, because I think they are two good individual performances that created a difference.”