“I certainly don’t think it’s soulless. I think there’s a magic around this place. I feel it almost straight away coming into the building, coming in and around it. I’ve obviously been around it for quite some time and then missed a little window, but I think there’s a magic around this place. You can’t help but feel that. Results and sometimes, from the outside, things look a little bit different, but it certainly doesn’t feel majorly different on the inside, I have to say that. Part of my role and the responsibility is shaping what we want to look like going forward as a group, and what happens on the pitch and the tactical side and the performances is one thing, but certainly the culture as well and how we think, how we act, how we behave, what it means to us to be here. That’s something that is part of my responsibility to spread in the right way.”
When we spoke to Darren [Fletcher] on Sunday, he was talking about the players feeling a little fragile in terms of their confidence at the moment. What have you and your staff done this week to try and rebuild that confidence?
“Obviously, I think a lot of confidence comes from… I think it’s funny confidence actually because you can sometimes get it from a little kind of moment or you can get a little situation, all of a sudden, it kind of sparks you and that’s sport, top-level sport. We’ve seen it throughout in every sport, when you’re confident and you’re in the zone and everything kind of happens a little bit slower but everything’s really clear and you’re calm. I think sometimes, when you want something so much and you’re so desperate that you can almost over-try, and it over-affects you at times. So, there’s that, there’s getting the balance of that and, listen, we’re here to support the players, we’re here to help them and we’re here to improve them and we’re there by their side to get them through it and, hopefully, they’ve felt that over the last few days. We’ve had three days to prepare for the game, but we feel we’re in a good place and everyone’s looking forward to it.”
The team you inherited from Ruben really struggled to put any sort of winning runs together. I think it was only when they beat Liverpool, Sunderland and Brighton in October, it’s the only time they’ve ever won back-to-back games in the Premier League. How are you going to go about sort of tackling that? Because obviously the challenge is to get into Europe, you’re going to need to win some games, but the team has not shown itself capable of sustaining sort of winning runs. How important is it? How are you going to tackle that?
“Yeah, it’s a fresh start, and I’ve got a lot of belief in the group, individually, and collectively. I’ve got a lot of belief in that, and as I’ve just said, confidence and a feeling, and things can go in a different direction very quickly, and I’ve got a lot of belief in the boys. I’m not going to tell you everything about how we’re going to do it because I’d be a bit silly to do that, but I think tactically and as a team, what we want to look like and things that we feel can help us and be hugely positive in what we can achieve. I think it’s so half-full, half-empty, it’s what players can’t do or the team can’t do, we actually forget what they can do, what they’re good at and believe in that and work on their strengths and feed off that energy to make you better. There’s a lot of players and a lot of teams in the world that can’t do things, but that doesn’t stop them being successful. So, we need to find that ingredient, and I fully believe we can do that.”
