With the amount of press that the modern Premier League manager has to do they can be forgiven for giving trite, clichéd answers. Then steps in Jose Mourinho with a surreal metaphor of how the club trumped Pep Guardiola's Manchester City to the capture of Alexis Sanchez.
Sanchez could make his first appearance for United this Friday as the club take on Yeovil Town in the FA Cup. Mourinho was waxing lyrical about Sanchez in the run up to the game:
He is very important for us because we want the best possible players. Because he has been in England for quite a long time, I think everybody knows the player he is, I think everybody knows what he did at Arsenal. I try not to speak about what he did before in Spain and Italy but in the Premier League he has shown the quality he has.
In explaining how the Chilean winger came to sign for the Reds ahead of their Manchester neighbours, Mourinho chose a rather odd analogy:
I think Alexis reminds me a little bit of the history - I don't know, it's not a history, almost a metaphor - when you see the tree with amazing oranges at the top and cannot get there. You say: 'Oh, I got the lower ones because I don't like the ones at the top.'
You like the ones at the top. They are so nice, so orange, so round, so full of juice but you cannot get there so you say: 'I don't want to go there' or 'I didn't like it, I prefer the other ones.' It reminds me of that story.
So to summarise, Manchester City have sour grapes over juicy oranges. The Portugese manager went on to say that money wasn't the stumbling block with Sanchez's failed move to City:
I know that if other clubs did not get him it's not a problem of money, for sure. That's not a problem of money.
All in all Mourinho seems to have gone a roundabout way to have a pop at City's failure to capture Sanchez. In light of his fruity analogy here are two more of the most famous citrus analogies in popular culture:
