“A surprise loss,” the interviewer stated at the end of the match, “what are your thoughts?”
“Well,” the defeated manager replied, “we played well during the first half but at the end of the day football is a game of two halves. Sometimes it is hard to come to these places on a wet Wednesday night and win. The guys ran their socks off today, they gave one hundred and ten percent but they just couldn’t break the defence down. They’ve got that big centre back, Dean, and on his day he’s unplayable.”
“How much do you think their defensive tactics stopped your flowing football?”
“Well we know they have a lot of whole-hearted physical players and today was all about stopping us playing. The whole team like getting into the faces of their opponents and we expected that to happen. Everyone knows that Stoke is such a difficult place to come and get a result. We were hoping that we could get Bentley on the ball a lot more, he has that cultured left foot so we are happy for him to shoot from range and he’s such a clever player that you expect something to happen every time he is on the ball. Today wasn’t his day. He’s been talked about as the new Messi and he has shown glimpses of that today but you can’t win them all.”
“What about Di Michele? You spent twenty four million on him but he had a disappointing evening.”
“When we bought him we were concerned he goes missing in big games but to be honest he is a great goal scorer. Tonight was a very physical match and he is not that sort of player, the Premier League is not the same as Serie A and he has found it hard to settle into the pace of the game here. Stoke away is not quite those famous European nights he is used to but we need to continue to work with him so he will become the player we know he is.”
“Did it not concern you that he missed quite a few chances?”
“It does but strikers have baren patches and he hasn’t played badly today, he was one on one with the keeper on more than one occasion, you might say he’s got to be hitting the target from there but he seemed to almost hit the ball too well at times. He also had the penalty shout and we’ve seen them given, just a bit of luck and he would of scored today.”
“I was going to ask about the penalty but what about their goal, a hint of offside?”
“For me it was offside but those type of decisions tend to even themselves out of the course of a season. I was more concerned by our defending, Bostock had no right to score from there and we need to look at our organisation. We had them on the back foot for large parts of the game and that means you can switch off at the back.”
“So, where do you go from here?”
“We need to move onwards and upwards, the luck was not with us tonight but we can’t be too harsh on ourselves, we need to take the positives out of the game. Your Barcelona’s and Manchester City’s don’t look at the negatives and we need to look to those teams if we are to be successful. We’re not in a relegation dogfight yet and we need to remember that Stoke are dark horses, they can beat the big teams and you write them off at your peril. We had some good balls in today but no-one of the end of them, we will work on that in training and go for it next game.”
“Thank you for your time.”