Edwin van der Sar's penalty shoot-out heroics won the annual pre-season curtain-raiser after a 1-1 draw at Wembley, but Mourinho took comfort from the way his injury-ravaged side competed.

Ryan Giggs gave United the lead but, despite being without John Terry, who could be sidelined for a month with a knee injury, as well as Didier Drogba and a host of others, Chelsea hit back to equalise through Florent Malouda.

Van der Sar denied Claudio Pizarro, Frank Lampard and Shaun Wright-Phillips in the 3-0 shoot-out victory, but that was not enough to stop Mourinho claiming his team were United's equals.

"To lose on penalties is different to losing in 90 minutes," he said. "In 90 minutes normally the best team wins but penalties are details that can decide matches.

"If I analyse the game with penalties I have to say they had an outstanding goalkeeper and the three boys who played very well couldn't score their penalties.

"If I give my opinion on the match without penalties, Chelsea didn't deserve to lose because we controlled the game for 90 minutes in quite an easy way.

"The situation was not easy to prepare this game but what makes me happy and confident is we were playing a team at near their maximum power except Paul Scholes.

"We are speaking about more than 50 percent of the team being out but we competed against them. I'm not going to say we were better than them but it is fair to say nobody was better than anybody else."

Mourinho refused to say when he expected Terry and Drogba back and instead heaped praise on their replacements.

"When you ask me abut John Terry and Drogba and all the boys who were not here, I don't want to go in that direction because I want to respect the boys who were here," Mourinho said.

"They played very well for me, so I prefer to speak about them, not the players who weren't involved in the game."

Sir Alex Ferguson played down the implications of a morale-boosting win for his side on the eve of the new season.

The United manager knows full well that Chelsea will be his side's main rivals again.

"We're always happy if we win these type of matches but it's not a great gauge because both teams were missing some players," Ferguson said.

"I always use it as a stepping stone towards the first game of the season. It was a very warm day, but it will bring the players on to the required pace of our game.

"There was not much between the sides in possession terms but we made the clearer chances and for that reason we deserved to win.

"They missed Drogba, there's no question about that. He is a very important player for them.

"But it doesn't matter if both sides had played their strongest team it wouldn't have given you any real information other than to say both will contest the Premier League title and possibly Liverpool and Arsenal will join in."

Ferguson was delighted to see Van der Sar emerge as the hero after a shakey end to last season.

"I think his experience came through there," he added. "He studied Lampard's penalty-taking and that experience has got the result for us today."