On whether he changed anything at half-time after ‘not creating’ in the first half…
I don’t completely agree with you but it’s not that we had chance after chance. That’s obvious. I see a lot of football, when we went in here, I saw a game of football, hardly conceded a chance from both ends in the first half. This is how the Premier League usually works; I think more in the second half it becomes a bit more open and there are more chances, more moments where you create chances. We’re not the exception to that. I think we had a few good moments in the first half where we were close to creating or we did create.
I can remember a cross that Curtis Jones was close to scoring [from], I can remember a shot from Cody Gakpo deflected and a one-on-one with the goalkeeper from Cody Gakpo. I would love to create more but if you play with the amount of midfielders we played with and one attacker against a 5-4-1 of Fulham in an away game, I don’t know if you can expect then us creating chance after chance. Overall, I think we’ve created enough chances to win the game and we did very well by limiting them to maybe one, one-and-a-half chances, but the end result is still 2-2 and that’s what it is about in football.
On overall chance creation from his side…
Like I said, I would love to create five times as many chances as we do now and not concede a chance at all. But I do know in the period of time when we were playing maybe either with different players or more open, I don’t think we created that many more chances, but we conceded much more. Unfortunately, we don’t concede a lot at the moment in terms of chances, but goal-wise maybe not a lot has changed. Like I said, I didn’t change as a manager: I would love to play with eight attackers if that is possible defensively as well, but if those eight attackers don’t defend enough then it’s hard to win a game of football. But we don’t have eight attackers, so that’s not possible.
On the fitness of Hugo Ekitike and Wirtz…
Yes, [Hugo] travelled because he felt something during the training session, so he went for an MRI scan and we got the result when we were flying. We were hoping it was just a bit of DOMS, which he also had. Why? Because Alex [Isak] has been out and since Alex is out [Hugo] doesn’t play 70 minutes or 60 minutes or sometimes gets a bit of rest. He has to play 80 or 90 minutes every single game for the first time in his life at Premier League level, for the first time in his life without a winter break, for the first time in his life at Champions League level. So not a surprise he then gets a bit tired and gets DOMS.
We were hoping it was only DOMS and then we could have used him maybe as a sub, but unfortunately, we saw a little bit more and then you cannot take a risk. Florian had the same last week when we put him in an MRI scan and there was only DOMS, so he didn’t have anything. But he is also experiencing this programme for the first time and if I don’t have that many players, I would like the ones I do have available and playing as many minutes as possible, but realistically. That’s what I tried to do today.
