Photo: Thomas Salme
After having watched his team produce a heroic performance against Tottenham, a cool, calm and collected Andrea Stramaccioni was interviewed by Italian Sky after the final whistle: “Tonight we gave a very important performance. There’s a strange atmosphere here, the critics continue but we respond on the pitch. We took a great step forward with regards to how we play, we found a sense of safety in how we play which is really difficult to find. We’re all united and we want to finish the season in the best way possible. Moratti? He phoned we last night and said ‘Hello Lucescu is that you’ and I replied ‘no it’s the same one as before.’ The President is fantastic.”
“Today we sent a fundamentallyimportant signal and the only glimmer of light in tonights result is that we don’t have to play midweek anymore. This was our best performance of the season. Kovacic? He is the very core of our project. Today he played as a playmaker ina very productive way and played really well as long as he was on the pitch. In our away game we suffered a lot in the middle of the pitch because of Dembele and Parker, today we decided to give more space to therir fullbacks but they never attacked us because they found themselves in trouble all the time and couldn’t capitalize on the extra space they were given. Also from this tactical aspect I think that this was our best performance of the season, their team was shaking with fear, we had the initiative the whole time. To bad that the result ended the way it did especially since we conceded a goal due to a second of inattentiveness, also we created many chances to score.”
“It was 120 minutes of an incredible intensity, some of our players finished the match in anything but a perfect physical condition but tonight I saw a real team and this is a giant step in the right direction. Now we look forward to the match against Sampdoria then we have a little break then we play Juventus; there’s a mini-tournament being played and tonight Inter responded that we are united. During difficult moments you risk being broken, due to the heavy criticism, instead our performance on the pitch speaks for itself. We’re coming from a time-period where I’ve been forced to use Palacio and Cassano: I can now work with the assurance that we’re making progress, also with regards to the tactical side” Stramaccioni concludes.
