Chelsea players have been coming to Jose Mourinho’s defense after starting the season with four losses in eight matches. John Terry and Cesc Fabregas both talked up his talents, but Diego Costa has mounted a different defense, blaming himself and his fellow players.

From the Guardian:

“We need to blame the players because we came back from holiday very confident, thinking we could go back into how it was last season, and then realised the team was already in a bad situation.

“I’m going to be very honest: maybe a few weeks ago, five or six weeks ago, I was not on top of my game. At least physically. We talk within the players and we know that, maybe at the beginning, we were not 100% as we were supposed to be when we got here. I got injured at the end of last season and then I went on holiday. Maybe I got out of my diet and, when I came back, I was not the way I was supposed to be. I was a little bit overweight. That affected my game. You can be selfish and blame it on the manager but I’m not going to do that. I’m responsible 100%, and so are the other guys. So all we can do now is train very hard and work very hard to try to get back to that level where we were the season before.”

By the way, Costa’s diet is human flesh and almond milk, but he’s back on it now, so everything is going to be fine.

In all seriousness though, some refreshing honesty from Diego Costa here. Usually it seems players are all to happy to let the manager be the scapegoat, but to divert blame back onto himself and admit to starting the season out of shape is quite honorable. And he was probably only decapitating one postal worker as he did it.