Head coach of Shakhtar Donetsk Marino Pušić commented on his side's 1-0 victory over Spanish side Barcelona in the Champions League group stage matchday 4, which took place in Hamburg yesterday.
Marina Pushich"How did we do it? As I said before, if you come out to play, you have to prove yourself and fight. This is the attitude I want to see from my team from the very beginning. This is what I demand from them. Secondly, you need to believe in a good ending, because everything starts in your mind. You need to believe and act.
Of course, we also had a game plan. We analysed our previous meeting, as well as the matches that Barcelona played between our two matches. We made several fundamental changes. The players did a phenomenal job. I must say that Barcelona had the ball for longer, but we could have scored even more without conceding at all. It was a perfect performance by my team.
As for our performance in the second half, we have to take into account the opponent we played against. We didn't want to play defence, but if your opponent is that strong, they just force you to do it. We knew this could happen, so we developed a plan accordingly. We closed important spaces, we created opportunities for counterattacks, we had good transitions.
I think it is an impressive achievement for my team not to concede a single goal. We stood like a wall. We didn't give them a single chance. Speaking of defence, it's a fantastic achievement. We tried to play, we wanted to play, we wanted to build attacks, but it's not always possible to keep possession for a long period of time when you have to defend against such a strong opponent. But the way we came out of defence, the way we organised our attacks, the way we created danger, again, was fantastic. I think we could have scored more than one goal. The reason for this was the strength of the opponent, which sometimes forced us to sit deeper than we would have liked. At the same time, you still have to dominate. For me, this also manifests itself not only in possession of the ball, but also in moments without the ball. And if you dominate at this level, you have a great chance of winning, as we did today. I think when you see the big picture, you realise that we deserved it.
It was a perfect implementation of the plan. My players deserve the best compliments. I can come up with something, I can have a plan, but they need to execute it on the pitch - and they were fantastic, so I want to give them credit. As I said, it's not easy to play against Barcelona. They are a very strong team, fantastic with the ball, incredible in all aspects. And you have to be very brave to dare to do what you want to do. We want to play, we want to have the ball, and we tried to do that as much as we could. And that's what I'm most proud of - not only the perfect organisation and defensive work, but also the fact that we tried to develop the attack, keep the ball, create chances at every opportunity. As I said before, if you watch the game, we could have had another goal, but I don't know if there was offside. We deserved this victory," said Pušić after the match against Barcelona.
