Jurgen Klopp when he became the Liverpool manager spoke about turning doubters into believers. You’ve said already that nothing would save your season but would winning a trophy help you turn doubters into believers?
“I think it’s not the most important thing of course it’s good that people are going to look at this season in a different way, especially the coach. It’s something more in the core of our club. There are a lot of things we need to change and we need to be consistent. [Winning the] Europa League is not going to change anything in our problems. It’s going to help us have Champions League next year and more money to spend, but the problems are still there. We have to change the minds of our fans with good decisions, with the Academy, with recruitment. This is what we need to change to take this club back to the top. This is more a shortcut to go to the European games, nothing more. The problems we need to solve in a different way with more time and be really clear on that.”
Are we going to see a happy United in the build-up, will you be more reserved and defensive?“We try to play the way we see the games and the way that works. We change each game. If we see the opponent, against Bournemouth it’s a team that can press really high so we suffer a goal building up in the way we build up, Bilbao is more or less the same thing. We are focused on the way we play and then we see what is the strengths of the opponent. We try to do the same. We are going to play the game that we see and we are paying attention to the strengths of the opponents.”
Manuel, how is it playing with Casemiro and what have you learned from him?
“I’ve learnt a lot from Casemiro. I have a very good relationship with him. I try to copy all the good things he has as a player, not only inside the pitch but also outside the pitch, because there are things that he does to win. I feel very comfortable with him and talk a lot with him. I’m learning a lot and I am very happy for him.”
Ruben, welcome to Bilbao. What strengths did you see in tomorrow’s opponents and what weaknesses?“I think they have a lot of good things. I’m not going to talk about the bad things, but they are really strong as a team, they are really intense, they are really aggressive. Even for a Spanish team, they are really aggressive on every duel. They have great players one against one. Nico Williams is a special player. They are the best defence in Spain in the league and we are not scoring too many goals so it’s going to be a tough match for us. We know that in the beginning of the game, 20-30 minutes especially, they are really strong and intense and use the crowd to take the game to a different level and we are prepared for that, so we are going to face a very strong team.”
