Ruben, is the Lyon game a reminder that you can’t take anything for granted?
“It’s everything together. If you look at our team, we cannot say today what is going to happen. There are some teams in any league that can understand, ‘the game is going to be like this’ and can change a little bit, but the story is going to be like this and we can control the narrative of the game. We cannot do that. So we have to face the game as one more game. I feel that we need to score to go to the next round, so that is clearly the way we are going to face the game. And then we use some image… Brentford, we are near the draw but we suffer a goal and suffer another goal, quite fast. That can happen. That happened four times here in Manchester United, so we know we will have to suffer a little bit to go to the final, and we are ready to suffer and we need to better at the small details in this game.”
So you don’t know which United will show up tomorrow night?
“Yeah, it’s hard to say. Sometimes, it’s not what kind of team we will be tomorrow. Sometimes, even during the game, we are one team, something happens and we lose our minds a little bit. But we are improving the way we play, we are more confident and we are ready to face this challenge.”
Ruben, you played in a Europa League final 11 years ago as a player, but as a manager, this would be the first time you’ve reached a European final, so on a personal level, how much would it mean to you as a manager, to get there despite all that’s going on?
“The meaning is you have to win it. As a manager, it’s not the same as a player. You want to play, you want to enjoy [it]. When you are a manager, you have to win it because, if you lose in the final, it will hurt even more, especially in this kind of season. So you need to win it. But for that, we need to focus on the semi-final, so I think it’s different from coach to a player. But we need to focus first on our semi-final, then we’ll think about the final.”
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