The coach understood that “the conditions are not right” to play a knockout match less than 72 hours before defining Group C.
“It seems crazy to me. If we were first, we could have had one more day of rest. Now it’s 1 in the morning (in Qatar), tomorrow we recover and we only have Friday to prepare for the game.”he questioned.
Scaloni said that only on Thursday will he analyze “the images” of the next rival, something he did not previously do in detail due to his idea of ”going game by game”. In any case, considered that Australia will be “a difficult rival like all” and gave as an example the defeat against Saudi Arabia in the debut.
“Anyone who thinks that there is an accessible match in football today is wrong”warned before lowering the euphoria for the result at Stadium 974.
“We are not candidates for anything or favorites for anything. We are going to fight. It is totally wrong to think that we are going to be champions for having won today. We played a good game, it is important, but nothing more“, he claimed.
“It wasn’t easy, you had to play and win against a team that was worth two results to qualify, as in the end it happened. We interpreted the game correctly and the players played a very complete game,” he said.
The coach ordered four changes in relation to the previous game against Mexico and the players who entered (Cristian Romero, Nahuel Molina, Enzo Fernández and Julián Álvarez) played at a high level.
“There are 26 who can play,” he summed up simply. “Some time ago the team went out of memory but we suffered changes, injuries, players who arrived at different rates and we always thought about the collective good”justified.
Scaloni was not surprised by the low level of Poland, which he attributed more to the “merit” of his team than to the failures of Robert Lewandowski’s team. “We did not allow them to have spaces for the contras,” he pointed out.
Finally, the Argentine coach told that the striker angel di maria, replaced in the second half, “his quadriceps got hard”, so he decided to enter Leandro Paredes. “It’s not worth risking, we have many variants in the team.”
With the only one that does not govern that criterion, he explained, is with Leo Messi: “If he does not ask me, I will not take it out,” he concluded.
Source: Ambito
I am Pierce Boyd, a driven and ambitious professional working in the news industry. I have been writing for 24 Hours Worlds for over five years, specializing in sports section coverage. During my tenure at the publication, I have built an impressive portfolio of articles that has earned me a reputation as an experienced journalist and content creator.
