London, July 19 (IANS) Chelsea head coach Jose Mourinho on Sunday said their Colombian striker Ramadel Falcao has taken huge pay cut to play for them and is determined to prove his doubters in England wrong this season.
Mourinho said the 29-year-old, who only managed four goals at Manchester United last season and is now on a one-year loan from French club Monaco, is so motivated to prove himself a success in the English Premier League (EPL) that he turned down bigger financial offers from other clubs to move to Chelsea.
“It’s his motivation. When you are not a top player, you never feel frustrated. When you are not a top player, you have to live with this all through your career and you adapt to it,” Mourinho was quoted as saying by dailymail.co.uk.
“But we felt his frustration. He is not happy that in England people think he is not as good as he is and his motivation is there. He did a lot of things to come to us. He lost money to come to us, he didn’t want to listen to other offers,” the 52-year-old Portuguese added.
“He helped us a lot to do a deal with Monaco. So all these things together we think we can help him and he can help us.”
Falcao, who has played 61 matches for Colombia, was understood to be on around 265,000 pound-a-week at United and will be on approximately half that figure at Chelsea.
And Chelsea are convinced that Falcao has recovered completely from the knee ligament injury he sustained at Monaco in January 2014 and can thrive once again as he did at Porto and Atletico Madrid.
“When a player is injured or has bad consequences of a big injury there is sometimes nothing you can do. We made ourselves sure that that was not the case with Falcao because if that was the case he would not be with us,” Mourinho said.