"Lots of people don't even know if Troy has long hair or short hair, is blond or dark," Mourinho said. "[But] they speak about: 'Troy, Troy, Troy, he should play!' There was a guy behind me on the bench the other day: 'Play Troy, play Troy'. I don't think he knows Troy.
"I was so happy with the way he performed [for the U23s] – and I’m not speaking about the goal.
"I told him before the game, every time you play with the kids of your age, you have to show why you are the privileged one, why you are training in the first-team every day and some of them are not.
"Because it was something that he was not doing. Every time he was playing with the kids, he was playing with the mentality of, ‘I shouldn’t be here, I am too good to be here, it’s not here that I want to play.’ And this is an educational process.
"That is why I was so happy with what we did yesterday. Yesterday I was not worried about [him] scoring goals or not scoring goals. I was worried about attitude, what he does, the way the other kids look at him.
"He has to go there and to show his attitude and professionalism and how privileged he is. He cannot go there with discontent or contempt."
Mourinho has previously named Manchester United academy graduate
Scott McTominay as one of his biggest success stories and the Portuguese continued: "I had exactly the same words with Scott McTominay. He was not loved in his group age, because he was not with the right frame of mind.
"The moment we started changing that, lots of things started changing for him. And every time he was going to the team, he was the best. He was the best in everything, the best in attitude, the best in character.
"This is the way you work with kids and if, in these generations, kids have things too easy in life, I think it’s part of the education to also see the other side.
"I think Troy will come even stronger and stronger when everything happens step by step. And not immediately. Because he is not ready for immediately. So it is a process.
"So tomorrow if he plays and he scores the winning goal, and he is the back page of your newspaper, nothing changes. The next week he goes again to play for the U23s. Everything is a process."
"He’s an Irish kid with a family based in Dublin, that comes to London," Mourinho continued. "He lives with a [host] family that Tottenham thinks is a perfect family to support him. But he’s a kid so, of course we need to take care of him.
"In the first-team, he is not surrounded by kids of his age. He is surrounded by top professional players with a different life and different lifestyle, with different focus on life. So he needs to have his feet on the ground, we need to help him to have his feet on the ground.
"To behave like a very young professional that has a career ahead of him, not as somebody in the last part of his career. There is an educational process.
"Everything is part [of it], also the way he trains with us. He is a privileged boy, he is being taken very good care of in the club. The boss of the academy John [McDermott] – I think I share with him many of the educational principles that are important for him. So everything goes very, very well. Everything goes very, very well.
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