Mircea Lucescu: "Today's game was encouraging"
The Zenit manager spoke about the blue-white-sky blues departure from the Europa League and the game in the Petrovsky.
First of all, I thanked them for their style of play, they played well. The team looked very different from that in Brussels, they showed their full commitment, on their faces it was written that they wanted to go on and we almost did it, Anderlecht created nothing all game, but one cross late in the game led to a goal. Unfortunately, this is football.
What's wrong with Shatov and why he did not play?
He felt unwell yesterday and went to the doctor. Today he underwent an MRI and it showed some problems. We left him out of the game because his condition could worsen and he could be out for a long period.
With such dedication do you believe the season can still be saved. So could you say it was a successful game?
I said in the locker room, now we only have the championship. Today's game was encouraging and we saw the great desire we had. We believe that we can go further. So now we can only concentration on the games in the Russian Championship.
Why did you replacing Hernani with Mauricio?
We also changed Ivanovic and Hernani. Since the first game in Brussels everyone said there was not a good interaction between the players, so we decided to go back to the team we had in the autumn, with the exception of Danny. The team was better in their interaction with each other and as we saw in the game today, I was right, the players did well, it was evident that everyone knew each others game. That's why I chose such a team. It's not easy to get players in the team model, so you need time for them to understand some things, then you can demand from them the maximum.
You always examine the details of the matches and can you recall what happened in the last few minutes?
It was not a case of us relaxing. The opposing team just started playing in numbers and we made a mistake in the last minute. We should have played a lot calmer to force them away from our goal. As with the goal that we scored, on the right side they attacked and got behind the defender and had numbers in front of goal, we should have got it well away and out of defence, as we know to do. Instead they intercepted the ball, played it to the opposite wing and played it into the penalty area and it happened that they scored.
