Read below words of the coach of Olympiacos Jose Louis Mendilibar in the post-Maccabi Tel Aviv press conference following the side’s 1-6 win in Serbia.
The presser by the Basque coach in detail:
If you were a journalist, what title would you choose? How do you explain what happened today?
Firstly, let me tell you that I struggle being a coach already; imagine me getting my hands also in journalism, how difficult I would have made it to you. It is really impossible to explain what happened; they only thing I want to tell you is that we truly believed we could play a good match and get a positive result. I don’t know if we had talked about qualifying, it wasn’t in our mind. What we had in mind was just to make a good game and get a good result. We set out with confidence, we believed in ourselves and stayed focused. We scored the first 2 goals and then the 3rd one, and we felt fully confident and satisfied. But when the penalty was called, we found it quite hard because we had put on a good display and we knew we could earn a good result. However, qualifying was indeed not in our mind at that moment. But then came the 4th goal and a couple more, and the whole thing was amazing.
As it turns out, has this been your birthday present? Also, what did you tell your players after regular time?
Indeed, that’s the best gift I have ever received; I never expected to get such a gift at this age that is the best I have ever been given. It was something beautiful; after the end, all players wished me happy birthday in the most beautiful manner. I am truly happy. This is one of the most beautiful moments of my life, not only in football. Before OT, I told my players to keep on playing the same way, stay calm and try to push forward because that way we could hurt them. The players followed my instructions and we are happy with what happened.
Can you explain us, in football terms, what happened in both matches and why they were so different?
It is inexplicable as I said before; it’s not something one may comprehend. I believe it is equally hard to their coach as well to explain how his team got an easy win away last week by a lead of 4 goals and, just a few days later, lost by 6 goals to the same opponent. When something of the sort happens, then both teams have messed up in these two matches. We certainly messed things up in the first leg, just like Maccabi now did in this match. Of course, one of the two teams went beyond its limits in each leg specifically.
Do you believe that, prior to kick-off, the fact that you had no “must dos” played a role in this match?
We had seen that in some of the pre-Maccabi fixtures, we found it hard to turnaround a negative score and we now had to do that; things went wrong and we had to launch such an effort. This is why players should have a strong mindset. We saw that, against top sides, we produced some good displays whereas when playing against weaker teams we found hard to win. This means players, although talented and skillful, they must have a good mindset. Today, our mindset was fine and certainly we must continue working.
