Monchi: “In the Philips Stadion the marriage with the Europa League began”

MADRID, 7 Nov. (EUROPA PRESS) –

Sevilla’s sports director, Ramón Rodríguez Verdejo, ‘Monchi’, described the Dutch PSV Eindhoven as “a fairly complicated rival”, with whom they will face each other in the Europa League playoff and which will help them return to a stadium where the “marriage” of the club with this competition began 16 years ago.

“We have been dealt a fairly difficult rival. This year they have changed their coach and with Ruud van Nistelrooy they are having a great domestic championship and a good Europa League, with a good collective level and with important players who define their quality”, Monchi warned the fans. official media of the club.

The manager does not hide that the crossing has “a special attraction” for being the return to the city where the club won its first UEFA Cup in 2006. “Whenever the name of the Philips Stadion is mentioned, our hair stands on end because That’s where the marriage began with this competition,” he said.

“Beyond that, the next thing has been the concern because they are an important rival, physically very strong and in tremendous form at a time. It is true that there are three months left and we don’t know how we or they are going to be, but we do We know that they are a very competitive rival and that it will be difficult to get through the tie”, he added.

On the fact of playing the second leg in Eindhoven, Monchi acknowledged that he prefers to have the second game “with the backing” of Ramón Sánchez-Pizjuán, but that in this case “there was nowhere to choose because it was already predetermined.”

“In this new format, where the second-best play against the third-place teams in the Champions League, the level is very high. A Barcelona-Manchester could be a Champions League semi-final and a Sevilla-PSV could be the Europa League final. The level It shows that it is not easy to win this competition”, declared the sporting director.