MADRID, 22 Oct. (EUROPA PRESS) –
The coach of Atlético de Madrid, Diego Pablo Simeone, stated this Saturday that “the bulky result” of their victory against RC Celta, 0-3 on matchday 10 of LaLiga EA Sports, “does not indicate what happened at the beginning of the match”, until the expulsion of the light blue goalkeeper Iván Villar.
“The large result does not indicate what happened at the beginning of the game. At the beginning, Celta played a good game; they had good transitions, with many losses of the ball on our part in starts. And we could not join together and advance to be able to make damage,” commented ‘Cholo’ Simeone at a press conference from the Balaídos Stadium.
“We rushed too much in the first passes, we didn’t have that associative game that made us progress and we lost it and lost it, and they evidently tried to counterattack to hurt us,” argued the Colchonero coach after the match.
In that context, the ‘Cholo’ said that the penalty committed against Álvaro Morata “changed the situation of the match a little”, as it led to a direct red card for Villar before the half hour was up. “Afterwards I think we read well the situation of changing the system to be more comfortable and to sustain the attack while we were attacking,” he added in this regard.
“And in the second half, it was another game. In the second half, the people who entered, entered very well. Rodrigo, Correa, Molina, etc. gave more vitality and more play to the team. And we already began to have another presence in areas close to the area and we ended up resolving a match that, I repeat, due to the overall number of how it ends does not mark what happened before the penalty,” Simeone insisted.
“In the second half I think we controlled it better,” he stressed. “We were always looking at what generated the most defensive security for the team. The truth is that it made me sad not to be able to put Javi Galán at home, a boy who has been working very well, who surely had a lot of enthusiasm for playing and will have been disappointed by not having entered,” he lamented.
“But I had to think about what I thought could happen and I chose Caglar [Söyüncü] In the last change because the game was not finished, there were 10 or 15 left with overtime. The truth is that I was sad that he couldn’t play in a game that would have been good for him to play,” he said regarding Galán’s substitution.
Finally, Simeone marked the imminent match in Glasgow as his next objective. “I watch the Celtic game, I see that we have to rest well because the effort is still great; especially for Griezmann, who could not rotate him or we thought it was appropriate not to rotate him,” he said.
“We need to continue thinking in the same way we have done since the first day I arrived: game by game. And tomorrow, think about Celtic,” he finally reiterated, a few days before Atlético faces the Glasgow team to matchday 3 of the Champions League.