Lionel Scaloni, insatiable: “You have to continue and not fall asleep”

The coach of the Argentine national team, awarded in less than a month as the best coach in America and the World, sent a message to his champions in Qatarin the run-up to the friendly matches next week and the following week against Panama and Curacao, warning that “soccer is like life, you don’t have to fall asleep on what you’ve achieved and move on to improve.”

“Football, like life, is like that: you don’t have to fall asleep on what you’ve achieved, but rather continue to improve. That’s why we will always give opportunities to the boys who come playing at a good level”warning scaloni in an interview with the Barcelona television program, El Curubito.

“We will always give chances to play to those who we really believe are better in each call, because there are constantly young people who are coming out. And that will happen when we believe that we should give those who have to have a chance. Because what here It is clear is that after winning the World Cup you have to continue and not fall asleep”the coach remarked that at this time he is visiting his family in his native city of Pujato in Santa Fe.

And always under his natural tendency to lower the “foam” to grandiloquence, scaloni He remarked that “you cannot spend every day thinking that you are a world champion. Because winning is not worth everything forever. Life goes on and there is always room to continue improving, or at least try.”

“For example, the The Best award that FIFA gave me to the best coach in the world, I value it more from the group than from the individual. And I’m not thinking about it all day either”he pointed.

“For example, now that we are going to play the first friendly with Panama in front of the Argentine public, we are going to prepare it with all the usual seriousness. Later, I don’t know what the party that is being prepared will be like, but on the pitch we will do our best, because people will want to see their players and celebrate. And it’s the moment to give the fans all the closeness they deserve, although always considering that in between they will have to play a game”he remarked.

And finally the 44-year-old coach looked back, to the immediate past, to inevitably refer to the third World Cup won by Argentina in Qatar, and on the summary point that “I wouldn’t change anything that was done then. First of all because of how it all ended, obviously, but fundamentally because I think that everything we had to do was done,” he concluded.

one of those things he did scaloni during the World Cup was not to let the players know the formation of the starting team until shortly before the start of a match, following the advice of his former River Plate colleague, Marcelo Gallardo, essentially so that it would not leak to the press if he did it with well in advance.