Regarding Wilmar Barrios and Ivan Sergeev. How serious are their injuries and when approximately will they return to action?
It's hard to say at the moment. Barrios has a (shoulder) ligament injury, we don’t know how long that will take to get better, we are waiting on the results, but he will miss the next match. Ivan Sergeev will definitely miss the next game and we’ll know more before the CSKA match. All the rest are pretty much ready.
There are only two days between the games with Khimki and Dynamo. How does your training schedule look between now and then?
For those who played, it will be recovery training, for those who haven't played much, they’ll be working as usual, and tomorrow we’ll have our standard pre-game session to prepare for the match.
CSKA have only played four official games in the new year and suffered two defeats and only have one win. What sort of game are you expecting on Wednesday?
Cup matches are cup matches, in the league they won one game and played the other a man down, and they had some good chances to score and win that game, but this is football and I think it's quite difficult to talk about the state of their team right now. They are at the top end of the table and with their new manager their style of play has changed a bit, they’re a very strong team and a very serious opponent, plus this is a cup match so current form goes out of the window, there are many other factors that can affect the result.
Three players are suspended and Ivan Sergeev is out, how will you cope on Wednesday in such an important match?
We’ll see. It does give us some difficulties having a group of players we can’t call on, but we have other guys who can play. We have Mateo Cassierra, who is playing well in my opinion and has created chances in every match he’s played. He needs goals to help his confidence of course, but he’s been very useful to the team in attack and is doing well. We have him and there are other players who can play in the attack. Let's see, we have some time and will think about how to play in the next match.
Who will replace Barrios or will you play a different formation?
There are various options. We have played matches without Wilmar before, so we have players who can play in his position, there are other formations the players are familiar with too, so we have time to look at the condition of our players and the other teams and then choose the best available solution.
In four out of your six Cup matches you started with your second-choice goalkeeper, but Mikhail Kerzhakov played in Ulyanovsk. So who are you considering for this position in the match against Dynamo?
Let's see. We look at the number of matches we have and the freshness of the players before making a decision on who will start. We have Kerzhakov, we have Vasyutin, and we have Odoevskiy. We have three goalkeepers and we’ll make a decision tomorrow about who will play.
With your lead in the league, you have the chance to lose a game, but there’s no such luxury in the Cup. So for you personally, does this competition raise the excitement levels?
I don't know about that, but they are comparable. I want to win in every game, both in the RPL and in the Cup. I don’t want to lose in either competition. But this is football and yesterday's match showed us all that you can play fine for 75 minutes, and then things can completely change direction. This is probably why the fans love the game.
