On the result and performance…
You know it is always very difficult to play against Marseille because of the passionate fans they have and the quality of the players. What makes it even harder is they have such a good manager, who always lets his team play so well. We were prepared for that. I think in the first half you could see we took the ball three or four times off them in very promising situations, but we couldn’t find the player that was completely free. We were in four versus three situations a few times and the one time we did find the player, it was fractionally offside.
On the ball, I think we were controlled – although I maybe better not use that word because it has been [misinterpreted] a few times lately – but we could find players in between the lines, we could bring our attackers into promising positions. It took a while before we scored the second because I think we had chances earlier on to score the second. The thing that was different for the first time this season than all the other games was that the moment we were having a big chance to score the 2-0 that hit the post, 10 seconds later they had a big chance. Usually this season this ball goes in and we’re all complaining, but now the ball went over, and we extended our lead to 2-0 and 3-0. The performance is still the same but the perspective of how people probably talk about us is completely different.
On whether he was ‘looking for a response’ from his team…
I can say it one more time, having a draw at home against Burnley is not the standard of this football club. But we’ve created three or four times more chances against Burnley than we did tonight, but we scored one and tonight we scored three. Even tonight, we created quite a lot of chances, by the way. Against Arsenal we played a very good game. Against Burnley, in my opinion still and everyone can disagree, we played a very good game.
Tonight, again, we played a very good game, but it is a completely different game because in a game like this tactical discipline, tactics, game-plan, it all matters. Where if you face a low block, you don’t have a meeting to tell the players how they have to bring the ball out from the back because you already have the ball within 25 yards of the goal. I think Pep [Guardiola] said – and I have said this already 15 times this season – about the importance of players dominating one-v-ones against a low block yesterday evening as well, so maybe when he says it people put more emphasis on it.
