On qualifying for the last 16 of the Champions League and Barcelona’s late goal denying Liverpool top spot for the moment…
Let’s start with a compliment for the referee in Lisbon. For the times I’ve worked in football I saw four minutes of extra time and then there were three minutes of time-delaying and then at four minutes the referee blew his whistle. But this referee kept on playing for a while, so maybe that was not in our advantage this time, but I like to see these things.
For the rest, it doesn’t tell me anything, because if in tennis you are No.1-seeded you know it’s always better to face the No.24 than to face the No.8, or the No.12, because this is a ranking that is done for years. But now we are in a new format where some teams are high in the league table because they had a lucky draw, or some teams are low because they had a very difficult draw. It’s far off to say that it is an advantage to be No.1 or No.2. We still don’t know yet if that’s an advantage or not. You might be lucky; you might be very unlucky and ending up as No.8 means that maybe you are lucky. So, for me, it doesn’t tell me anything, what for me is the most important thing for tonight is that we’ve managed to skip a round and that is definitely worth a bit.
On the performance and effort from his team against Lille…
-I am used to [it] from these players, what maybe today asked a bit more from them [is] that they had to be patient because the reason why Lille has done so well – 21 games unbeaten and the teams they’ve beaten in the Champions League – is, without any disrespect at all, they don’t have the best players in the world, they have very good players, but they don’t have the best players in the world and then to be able to do so well tells you how disciplined they are, how hard they want to work and how well the manager does over there.
We were not starting to force [anything] because they are really compact and defended really well. We didn’t force a pass; we just kept the ball for as long as we could. The only thing I wasn’t happy about is that not for the first time in recent weeks it was one chance for the other team and a goal, but that’s maybe a phase of the season we are in at the moment.
Belgium
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