Cádiz CF head coach Álvaro Cervera spoke to reporters in his customary Friday press conference, discussing how training has gone this week and what shape the team is in, and looking ahead to Saturday’s LaLiga Santander game against SD Eibar.
Confident: “We didn’t begin the week in bad spirits at all, because we were by no means unhappy with Sunday’s performance [against Real Betis] – albeit we were unhappy with the result. The sense I’m getting from the players is that they’re confident, they’re calm and they’re raring to keep on battling hard. They realise that the situation we’re in is a better reflection of reality – that the position we were in before couldn’t last. This game is really important. Hopefully we won’t be overly conscious of that fact, and we’ll keep calm and play our game. When you have an important game, you really feel that importance and it has an effect on everything, training included. But it has gone well. We’ve had a good week.”
Absences: “Other than Fali, who is dealing with a little bit of an issue and has barely trained, we have everyone available. We’re better-placed now to keep up our level of performance throughout the game; we found it a little bit harder before, because we were having to field players out of position when we made substitutions. Now we have pretty much everyone available and we’ve got fewer worries in that regard, but we remain in a tricky position. We’re a stronger team now because we have most of our players available to play.”
Important game: “There are still a lot of games to go and a lot of points at stake, but this game is also about its psychological effects. There’s no getting away from that. If we win this game, we’ll go home with a smile on our faces and with a bit more breathing space, and they’ll be feeling exactly the opposite. And vice versa if we lose. The sides who survive relegation this season are going to do so in the final games.”
Saturday’s opponents: “Eibar are a side I’ve always felt are an example to follow, because of how they’ve grown from being a Segunda B club to a Primera club. They’re among the teams with the clearest idea of what they’re about. They always play the same way, wherever they’re playing. I like their playing philosophy. I like the fact that they stay faithful to an idea and don’t start chopping and changing if results don’t go their way. They don’t let themselves be swayed – they just focus on working hard on their game day in, day out.”
Defence: “For Cádiz, it’s not about attacking more or less or how many attackers we field, it’s about how many players we defend with. We have to defend with four defenders and two deep-lying central midfielders. If ever we defend with fewer players than that, we’re very vulnerable. We aren’t a side who can defend with the number of players other teams defend with. That’s my thinking. It’s about how many players we defend with.”
Cádiz’s campaign so far: “We didn’t think we’d have the start to the season we had or the run of defeats we’ve had, with so many goals conceded. Overall, we’re more or less in the position I thought we’d be in, but I wasn’t expecting that start to the season or the amount of goals we’ve conceded in recent times. But you learn from everything that happens. We’re in Primera with the goal of keeping ourselves in the division and we’re learning a lot of things that we didn’t know about this league.”
Bryan Gil: “He’s an electric young player; he’s really good. A left-footer who plays on his natural wing. Eibar’s other option there is [Takashi] Inui, who’s also a player I like. I’m not going to be particularly keeping an eye on whether he plays or not, other than considering what effect that might have on how we approach the game, obviously.”
Differences between Cádiz and Eibar: “The difference between the two teams is how long they’ve been in Primera. Eibar’s playing style is different: they’ve had enough time in the top flight to sign the type of players they need for their brand of football. That’s really the difference. We have two different ways of seeing the game; some will prefer one, others will prefer the other.”
