Jose Mourinho has a new philosophy this season. He will try not to incite the crowd or start a war of words with Arsene Wenger at Cardiff tomorrow as he begins a quest to follow a Portuguese proverb that translates in English as "the dog barks but the caravan goes by".

"I will try to ignore, not to answer to everything," Mourinho said yesterday. There is a catch, however. "When I feel it is hurting too much, or it hurts my players, I will jump."

Mourinho demonstrated the new approach by refusing to rise to the bait when asked to respond to Wenger's comments that Chelsea paid double the real value of Shaun Wright-Phillips.

"I have no reaction," he said, before explaining that transactions between English clubs always lead to inflated prices. "I think the English market is a special market. It is not because of Chelsea. It is because it is English football and the English market.

"In football there are no cheap players," he added. "If he was a player from a Portuguese team, a Spanish team, a Belgian team, I'd say he was expensive. When he's English I don't say he is expensive because that is your market."

Mourinho has already witnessed the value of his signing from Manchester City. "He's even better than I thought," he said. "He's more intelligent playing football than I can think. Not just intuitive, he also thinks about the game.

"At the moment, he is ready to play. He is not like a new player coming to a dark picture, he's ready to play like everything's clear for him."

Wright-Phillips's arrival has eased the burden on Chelsea should their wingers Arjen Robben or Damien Duff not be in the team. "We have four of them. When I have the chance to make six changes and have seven substitutes, I don't play the same two players for 90 minutes."

Chelsea were linked with Michael Owen, but Mourinho feels it would be wrong to sign him from Real Madrid and put him in the same situation as he finds himself in at the Bernabeu. He also would not fit into Mourinho's tactical plans. "We play with one striker normally and two wingers," said Mourinho.

"I made a big investment in Drogba, a player I love, a big investment in Crespo, a player I love. Carlton Cole is a personal bet I want to win and Gudjohnsen can be what I want. So I cannot buy another striker just to say I have five instead of four."

Mourinho was not entirely without mischief, suggesting that Manchester United players such as Gary Neville and Ryan Giggs were claiming they will win the title because of their lack of success last season.

"They have won all their life," he said. "They won nothing last season. They say they'll win this season. It's normal."

He explained it was equally natural for Peter Kenyon to have made his comments about how he felt they would cruise to the title. "He says what he says in his soul, what he has in his heart, what he wants, what is his desire."

He was also not entirely uncritical of Arsenal. He made a jibe about their failure to bring in English players. "If we are to have a core of English players, we have to buy at least one English player every season and that's not easy," he said. Mourinho claimed he and Wenger were "professional" but relations with Alex Ferguson are evidently warmer. "During the game we're not friends, but after the game it's the same story. The bottle of wine is there, the television is there, the food is there. We sit, we speak and we laugh.

"If next week we have some words, a fight in the press, we are intelligent enough to understand that it's football, but the next time we see each other we respect each other again."

Guardian Service