Jose Mourinho has tipped Romelu Lukaku to ignore the hype about his amazing start at Manchester United after the Belgian’s brace set up a 4-1 victory over CSKA Moscow.
Lukaku, 24, scored twice at the VEB Arena to send Mourinho’s men three points clear at the top of Champions League Group A and added another one on Saturday against Crystal Palace.
“Amazing numbers for Romelu. He’s humble, he wants to learn all the time, he wants to improve all the time,” the United manager told reporters.
“I think ambition is there and I don’t think he’s going to be very impressed with your great words because he knows that when things are not going well, your words are also strong in a negative way.
“I trust that he can keep performing for us.”
“The team is solid, the team is playing well,” said Mourinho, whose team are level on points with league leaders Manchester City.
“We start the competitions strong, August and September really strong in all the competitions.
“We have now just one more game, a difficult one, against a fresh team when we are still here (in Moscow) and we have a game on Saturday at three o’clock.”
“It was my best team too,” he said when asked to account for CSKA’s poor showing.
“It’s true. I came here of course with very good teams -– Chelsea, Inter (Milan), Real Madrid -– but I think this was the strongest performance.
“With Real Madrid and Inter we came for the knockout phase. We came to play for a very specific result. We were happy with the goal. We were happy with the 1-0, the 1-1.
“Today we were really strong. It was my strongest performance here.”
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