Skip to main content

CERVERA: “BETIS ARE A SIDE WHO PLAY VERY GOOD FOOTBALL”

The Cádiz CF boss looked ahead to his team’s trip to Seville

There are no reactions yet. Be the first!

Cádiz CF head coach Álvaro Cervera spoke to the media via video link ahead of Friday’s LaLiga Santander matchday-two clash with Real Betis Balompié. “It’s been a short week,” he said. “We’re working hard and doing our homework on the other teams; LaLiga has only just started, so we don’t have all the information. We just want to get results on the board and, as the season starts to progress, we’ll start to pay more attention to where we are in the table and start to have a clearer picture about each team we play against. We want to pick up points early doors and get ourselves into a comfortable position.”

Top-flight survival: “It’s going to be much tougher than last season. The clubs who have been promoted are very strong, both in footballing and financial terms. Hopefully we can repeat what we did last season. Last year, we won games in the first half of the campaign that you don’t tend to win every year. As a coach, I don’t like it when we don’t have a decent amount of breathing space in the league table, but we know it’s going to be difficult to repeat the gap we managed to open up last term. We have to be prepared to find ourselves in our natural habitat, with less room to spare. If we want to be in with a shout of staying up, we’re going to have to fight tooth and nail.”

On Friday’s opponents: “Betis and their coach have a very recognisable style of play. When a team plays with [Sergio] Canales in central midfield and with [Nabil] Fekir in attacking midfield, we know they’re a team who are going to try and keep the ball, open you up with patient build-up play and then look for players like Rodri, Borja Iglesias, Canales and Fekir to do the rest. They’re a side who play very good football and try to win that way.”

Eager for improvement: “We want to preserve our identity as a team, which is based on defending our own goalmouth well and accepting that possession isn’t the be-all and end-all, but we need to develop as a side. We were pretty flat with ball at feet against Levante, until they went ahead and started to drop deep; then, with more space to play in, we did damage when we were in possession. We need to find a way to have a bit more of the ball without it being a problem for us. In recent years, when we’ve tried to keep the ball a bit more, we’ve run into trouble. It’s an area we have improved in, but if we can’t get results that way, we’ll stick to the style of play we’ve always followed and we’ll keep on working on our game.”

How he wants his team’s display to be different to the opening-weekend draw with Levante UD, and what he wants his players to keep doing: “I’d like to see us avoid dropping quite so deep, which was my fault. Without it causing us problems, I don’t want us to sit as deep. When we have the ball, I want us to play with the same purpose that I saw in the second half the other day.”

A tough match: “I don’t expect a game similar to our 5-3 win [at the Benito Villamarín in the 2017/18 Copa del Rey]. My take on Betis is that they’re a side who have the kind of quality that if you let them settle into their rhythm, they can overrun you. If we make it an awkward game for them, if they have to do more than they had expected, if they have to make changes, then we’ll have a chance of hurting them. There’s no getting away from the fact that they’re a better side than us, but with the weapons we have at our disposal, we’re confident that tomorrow can be a day like other good days we’ve had.”

You can watch Cervera’s press conference in full (in Spanish) here: https://tv.cadizcf.com/media/t/1_a7mma2c6