What was your reasoning for choosing Struijk as your defensive midfielder rather than someone like Klich or Dallas?

For me one of the most difficult things to neutralise from the opponents was how their two defensive midfielder play. You watch closely in the first half, one of the biggest things for us was that we didn't manage to control Xhaka and Ceballos. In front of them Odegaard played, who is an offensive player.

If Klich or Dallas had played against Odegaard before the game, neither Dallas nor Klich are defensive midfielders and Pascal can play in this position. In our team the defensive midfielder is the third defender. In our team, the two centre-backs and the defensive midfielder are the ones that defend the most.

If I had interpreted that Klich or Dallas was our third most defensive player I think we would have had even more problems than we did. I think the biggest issue that we had was that we were not able to neutralise the circulation between the two centre-backs and the two centre-mids in the first half.

We evaluated the first half but the second half was the same but in reverse.

Are you frustrated with the goals you conceded today? Were they either self-inflicted or avoidable?


In the first half we didn’t defend well and we didn’t defend well because the ball went from back to front too comfortably, too cleanly for Arsenal. More than the avoidable or not avoidable goals. I think that we would have defended better or we would have defended well if we had stopped the influence of number eight and number 34. I prepared the team to avoid this happening.

Clearly, the opposing manager prepared well his team to avoid us from achieving this. This was because each manager resolved the situation in front of them in a different manner. In the first half we lost 3-0 and in the second half we won 2-1.