Mancini

Roberto Mancini sat down for a long talk about the past season with Inter Channel that was aired yesterday. Here is a bit of what he said, for the full interview head over to inter.it.

Mancini and the team missed out on third spot and the Champions League spot, which was the declared goal of the season. The coach underlines that the team is still under construction though and that he thinks that they are on the right track:

Inter missed the chance to close in on third place in March, when Roma scored a late leveller to deny Inter the points in the capital. “If we’d won that game, something would have changed,” Mancini admitted. “Perhaps we could have put the match to bed but Roma deserved to equalise with all the chances they had from the 70th minute on.

The Nerazzurri were impressive against eventual Serie A runners-up Napoli both in the Coppa Italia quarter-final at the San Paolo and in the league fixture at San Siro – further proof that Inter more than held their own against the bigger teams.

“Only in the away game against Juventus were we outdone but that’s because we gave away chances. We never really struggled against the sides that finished above us and that shows we’ve got good foundations in place. It’s not all bad, as some people would have you believe. I think we’re on the right track to becoming a team that can challenge for the title again.

Both Mancini and Erick Thohir have stated that players need to know what it means to play for Inter, and that also means winning trophies. Here is what he had to say about that subject, stressing that patience is important as well:

“When I joined Inter in 2004 we had some superb players but they hadn’t won anything for years. It took us two years to start off a winning cycle and we had a team that was much more ready. Now it’s been a year and a half – not five. We might make a few more mistakes yet. A coach can sense when a team is coming together and I think it is. Now we need to make two or three additions and we’ll be able to move up another level.”

Source: inter.it