On qualifying for the round of 16 of the Champions League and Barcelona’s late goal denying Liverpool first place at the moment…
Let’s start with a compliment to the referee in Lisbon. The times I worked in football, I watched four minutes of extra time and then there was a three-minute delay and, at four minutes, the referee blew the whistle. But that referee kept playing for a while, so maybe it wasn’t in our advantage that time, but I like seeing these things
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Otherwise, that doesn’t tell me anything, because if in tennis you are number one, you know that it is always better to face number 24 than to face number eight or number 12, because this is a ranking that has been done for years. But now we are in a new format where some teams are at the top of the league table because they had a draw, or some teams are at the bottom because they had a very difficult draw. It’s hard to say it’s an advantage to be number one or two. We still don’t know if this is an advantage or not. You might be lucky; you can be very unlucky and finishing as number eight means that maybe you are lucky. So for me that doesn’t tell me anything, what for me is the most important thing for tonight is that we managed to skip a round and that’s definitely worth a little bit
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-On his team’s performance and effort against Lille…
I’m used to this from these players, which maybe today I asked for a little more from them [é] that they had to be patient because the reason Lille have done so well – 21 games unbeaten and the teams they beat in the Champions League – is that, without any disrespect, they don’t have the best players in the world, they have very good, but they don’t have the best players in the world, and to be able to do so well shows how disciplined they are, how much they want to work and how well the manager does there.
We weren’t starting to force [nada] because they are very compact and very well defended. We didn’t force a pass; we just kept the ball as long as we could. The only thing I’m not happy about is that for the first time in the last few weeks it wasn’t a chance for the other team and a goal, but maybe that’s a phase of the season we’re in at the moment.
Swiss
