Paris Saint-Germain beat Aston Villa 3-1 (video highlights PSG/Aston Villa) this Wednesday at the Parc des Princes in the first leg of the Champions League 2024-2025 quarter-finals (return on April 15). After the match, Paris coach Luis Enrique spoke to Movistar.
Luis Enrique: “We were right to bring him over from Rennes”.
Doué?
Everyone loves Doué, and we were right to bring him over from Rennes. He’s also an extremely cultured, optimistic boy, always smiling. Right now, we’re trying to calm him down… not him, but the people around him, because it’s obvious that he attracts a lot of attention.
Look at the defensive efforts he’s made, superior technical ability, beastly physical capacity, ambition, always smiling, and so on. It’s a bit like the spirit we have with young players, players who have just seen the Champions League on television and want to be the protagonists.
Luis Enrique “Perhaps most of all, this team’s ability to overcome problems.”
What are you most proud of?
Anything and everything. Perhaps above all this team’s ability to overcome problems. Because I think the match was very complete, in which Aston Villa decided to retreat and keep their goal a little more. We insisted in the same way, which is always very difficult when a team is fresh.
We tried to create a danger for them, they scored a goal in a great transition because they have that ability and that technical and physical power, but we kept insisting, insisting, insisting….
We equalized before the first half, which I consider very important, and in the second half, justice was done, which I think, with the last-minute goal, which doesn’t make us change our approach to the second match, because that’s not in our mentality, but it does make us more optimistic and reinforces our supporters’ feeling of staying in the competition.
Luis Enrique “be competitive without fear.”
Every coach is looking for a team; a team full of good players, that’s what every coach is looking for. It’s clear that this season we went through a different process, because we had to adapt to what we had in the team, individually and collectively, reinforcing an overall idea of the game, and I think it’s clear that the team continues to grow
Today, we left some very important players on the bench, Barcola for example, or Warren [Zaire-Emery], or Lucas Hernández, or Kang-in Lee, or Gonçalo Ramos, or Marquinhos, our captain. I mean, that’s the idea: to continue with this objective and be competitive, that’s what we want and to be competitive without fear.
Luis Enrique “trying to win the match because that’s the best way not to speculate.”
PSG favourites for the title?
This competition is not about favourites, there are no favourites. Yesterday, Madrid and Bayern Munich lost their matches, but that doesn’t mean the qualifiers are over.
Today we won, Barça won convincingly. We won a little less, but we don’t play games to speculate, I’ve never done that in my career.
After that, they can score four goals or as many as they like. Our idea is to take the little round thing that goes around the pitch at full speed and try to win the game because that’s the best way not to speculate.
Translated with DeepL.com (free version)
