Jose Mourinho felt cheated Chelsea did not put Norwich City emphatically away at Stamford Bridge.

Diego Costa's 64th minute strike set up a tense finale for the Blues before earning a priceless Premier League win that moved the champions above Alex Neil's side in the table.

'We didn't deserve the heartbeat of the last four minutes or so. We deserved to be enjoying the last four minutes with a 2-0, 3-0 or 4-0 result, but we couldn't,' said Mourinho. 'Once more the relationship between how we played and the number of goals we scored wasn't good. We should have scored three, four or five but we didn't.

'We had to cope with the pressure in the last five minutes because it was there, I felt it and the players felt it. We coped well with that and we got a result that we obviously needed very much.

'It's a bit of a relief. I'm not nervous on the bench but you get a bit disappointed with the way things are going. After the goal (Kurt) Zouma hit the bar; if he didn't touch the ball it's a goal. Then in the last four minutes you are there and you think that maybe we will concede so, yes, there is a bit of relief but fundamentally I'm happy for the players because they are working well and they deserved it.'

Mourinho reserved special praise for Costa who scored his first goal in 603 minutes of competitive action after spurning two clear-cut first-half opportunities.

'I know for sure there are many pundits who were strikers and they know the feeling when you don't score, you get heavier. For every game you don't score you have five kilos more and the pressure is there,' said Mourinho. 'In the first half he missed two chances, the second one was a big one, so it was important for him. He's working well, he's a happy guy and tries everything. He's positive. If I had to choose somebody to score the winning goal I would go with him.

'Everything is connected; when you are full of confidence you are fluent in your decisions, you choose well your movements and the number of touches; when to hold, when to keep possession. When you lose confidence you lose that. Yes he can do much better but one goal is very important.'

Mourinho reiterated Chelsea's chances of retaining their title are already over, but the Portuguese is confident of a top four finish.

'If you ask me the title, I would say it's an impossible mission. Maybe Tom Cruise can do it,' he said. 'It's complicated because you have to recover points from four candidates. But I said already that the fourth position for me is not an impossible mission. To recover positions and points to teams that normally are in the middle of the table and who will also have a little bit of a collapse, for sure, because everybody will have that. It is possible. The fourth position is a difficult position but a possible target.

'We have to go game after game. Now it is Maccabi (Tel Aviv in the Champions League) and we hope we can win and maybe the Porto versus Dynamo Kiev result allows us to qualify before the last match.'