Tottenham boss Jose Mourinho admits it is the players he has had at his disposal that have helped him earn a strong record in London derbies.
Mourinho has won 40 of his 66 games in charge of all-capital affairs across his time in the Premier League and will be aiming for his 41st victory when Spurs visit West Ham on Sunday.
The majority of those wins came across two successful spells at Chelsea but he has beaten the Hammers and Arsenal while at Tottenham.
Mourinho is now humble enough to say his record is down to the players.
“Special teams. Special teams win lots of matches,” he said. “We coaches are as good or as bad as our players make us. We depend a lot on them.
“Especially coaches with a lot of experience and long histories, who went through every possible experience.
“We get to a stage of our career where we feel much more stable, much more humble and we realise with all the experience we have that the ones really responsible for our career are the ones that play for us.
“So hopefully at the weekend the guys have a great performance and they can make me look good. Because they’re the ones that make us look good or bad.”
Mourinho’s side return to action less than 72 hours after beating Wolfsberger 4-1 in the Europa League – a competition that the Portuguese very much wants to win and might be Spurs’ best route into next season’s Champions League.
But he says contending with teams who have been eliminated from this season’s Champions League is unfair.
“The Europa League is a competition that a lot of teams want to win,” Mourinho said.
“Lots of teams want to win it. I believe in a not fair way it’s also a competition that some teams that were knocked out of the Champions League want to win.
“I always felt that the Champions League for the teams that qualified for the Champions League and Europa League for the teams that qualify for the Europa League, but it is the rules and we have to respect the rules but these teams that drop from the Champions League to the Europa League they become favourites.
“Not just them but lots of teams think they can win it. Just looking to our country, Tottenham, Arsenal, Manchester United and Leicester for sure all of them want to win and all of them think they can.
“Then you go to many other countries and you find very good teams with similar ambitions so it’s a very difficult competition to win. Lots of matches.”
