On whether he thought about taking Salah off or if his aim was to overload with attacking players…
If you need a goal and things are not going really well – although in the second half I felt we were better and better and better and we came closer and closer and closer – but I thought about almost every substitution. But in the end you always come back to, ‘I don’t want to leave this stadium with a draw thinking I didn’t bring all my attackers in, all the guys that can score a goal.’ In another game you maybe wonder is it worth the risk to play with seven attackers, but against a team that plays with 11 players in their own 18-yard box that’s not, I think, a big risk then and that’s why we decided to do that. And taking Mo off – if you need a goal, it will probably happen this season or maybe next season, but it probably won’t happen a lot.
On whether Alexander Isak, who was not named in the matchday squad, trained this morning…
No, he did recovery but he had a hard and tough session yesterday. So, I can explain to you – it will take a few minutes but is not that difficult to understand. So, if you start the season when the players who have been off for three or four or five weeks, you give them a certain base. You give them a lot of good sessions before they are able in the end of the week to play 45 minutes. We got him from Newcastle in a state where you could say his pre-season is going to start now, so then he needs proper minutes of training before he has a certain base, let alone for him to play twice in three days. So, that’s what we do, what we try to prepare players for in the beginning of the season is [to play] once a week and then we try to do more and more and more for a minimum of two games a week so they are ready for that schedule.
Now, Alex is far from ready for that schedule of three games in a week, 90 minutes. But then we could use him today for five minutes and then Wednesday again 10, and then 15, but we don’t believe that is the way to build him up. We believe it’s the way… Sweden did the right thing of giving him good sessions without playing him a lot because if you play the player you cannot give him good sessions. They did the right thing [and] we did the same, so now he will be able either Wednesday or Saturday to play 45 as a minimum, and maybe a little bit more. But if he plays 45 on Wednesday don’t expect him to play 45 or more on Saturday because his body is not prepared for that in our opinion.
