Mourinho plays down pressure of matching Fergie

DAVID Moyes returned to Manchester United today for the first time since being axed from “the impossible job” — yet Jose Mourinho claims not to be overawed by trying to emulate Sir Alex Ferguson.

Moyes will be back at United two years after the club sacked him, when ‘the chosen one’ quickly became ‘the wrong one’ and was dismissed just 10 months into his stint as Ferguson’s successor.

He left the club seventh in the Premier League and out of Champions League contention, with the task of keeping United perched at English football’s summit also proving beyond his immediate successor Louis van Gaal.

Mourinho, the third man to take up the baton, has yet to restore the club to the heights of the Ferguson era but does not perceive that period of glory as an albatross around his neck.

“I don’t feel it as a burden, I feel the great history of the club as only positive things and not negative things,” Mourinho said.

“The problem is, if you have the conditions to follow that success of history, then that’s a different story.

“One thing is having Gary Neville, Paul Scholes, David Beckham, Ryan Giggs and Nicky Butt, all those guys 25, 26, 27 years old. It’s another thing to have them at 30, 31, 32.

“Obviously that plays a part so there are generations and, in a certain period when probably David came, it was not so easy to go in that winning direction. At the same time, and I think this is even more important, the Premier League was changing.

“I think it was just a bad moment in David’s career.

“He has to do what I did, what we all do, move on — and he has now done that.”