What Jose Mourinho said to Troy Parrott during their time together at Tottenham looks very interesting now after the striker became Ireland’s hero in a dramatic, edge-of-your-seat 3-2 win over Hungary on Sunday afternoon. The AZ Alkmaar forward scored a hat-trick - capped by a 95th-minute tap-in - to help the Boys in Green qualify for the World Cup playoffs.
It was the latest in a run of impressive performances, and the 23-year-old is now being linked with a return to the Premier League just a year after leaving north London. Seven goal involvements in the Eredivisie marked the start of a major turnaround for the Irishman, and his heroics for his country have sent his reputation soaring. Watch his winning goal below:
Still young, Parrott is stitching together a redemption arc at exactly the right moment, but his luck in front of goal hasn’t always looked this good. He played only four times for Tottenham, failed to score, and spent most of his five-year stint out on loan. But a conversation with Mourinho - though brief - might just have been the making of him.
What Mourinho Said To Troy Parrott at Tottenham
Parrott also scored both goals as the Boys in Green stunned Portugal 2-0 on Thursday in his hometown of Dublin, in a week that probably couldn't have been any more perfect for him and his teammates.
But while having initially drawn comparisons to Robbie Keane early into his Tottenham career, it never worked out in north London for the highly-rated youngster, with Mourinho having some choice words for him in March 2020 when Parrott was Tottenham's only fit striker.
He told him to stop thinking that he was 'too good' to still be playing for their under-23s when he'd been training with the first-team all season. As per the Mirror, he said:
"I told him before the [youth team] game: 'Every time you play with the kids of your age, you have to show your colleagues why you are the privileged one' because it was something he was not doing.
"Every time he was playing with the kids, he was playing with the mentality of, 'I shouldn't be here' or, 'I am too good to be here'. I had exactly the same words with Scott McTominay [at Manchester United]."
The now-Benfica manager continued: "He was not loved in his age group because he was not there with the right frame of mind. The moment we started changing that lots of things started changing for him. Troy cannot go there [the underage teams] with discontent, contempt.
"It is a process. So everything goes very, very well. But this is a world where lots of people don't even know if Troy has long hair or short hair, or is blond or is dark. They don't even know that, and they speak about Troy, Troy, Troy. There was a guy behind me on the bench the other day: 'Play Troy, play Troy'. I don't think he knows Troy."
Parrott now plays with the humility of a seasoned striker, and his stock this season is only going to keep rising. While he once had the talk of a young forward who knew he was good, he now has the walk - and the swagger - to back it up. Nobody will ever know exactly how much of his turnaround can be attributed to Mourinho, but he has certainly framed his mindset differently since leaving Tottenham.