Mircea Lucescu: "It was a very important camp to prepare the team"
The blue-white-sky blues manager on the results of the first Gazprom Training Camp, the matches played and the transfer window.
I've said it before, I'm happy with the team, the games with the players at the facility and the overall analysis of the whole camp. In many ways, I'm happy with the team. It was a very important camp to prepare the team for the second part of the championship and to establish the team for other competitions, which can all be completely different from each other. As for team tactically, we focused on better defensive play, because our game is based on moving out of defense well and playing from the back.
It is important that we had a large number of matches and it is important that the players were much more highly motivated than in training and I was pleased. I like to train in psychological aspects and to motivate the players. These games allow us to adapt and integrate the young players our new signings. Just in this game we saw some of the required dedication from the players. In the training process it would be impossible to achieve this.
With all the tasks that I set the players, I am satisfied with. It was nice that everyone responded to the job very well. We have finished the first stage, the second is more important and at the next camp we will play with team's from a little higher level, although we can not say that the level of this camp was low, Videoton are the champions of Hungary and they have a lot of experienced foreign players. The same can be said of Lokomotiv Tashkent. Eintracht Frankfurt, are in fourth place in the Bundesliga too.
Analysis and statistics have shown that we have been growing from day to day, from each game to game and today's match was obvious for all to see that we are in good shape and are a good team. We established our game in the second half. I would not like to single anyone out, but I will say that the young players such as Zuykov, Jovanovic, Lesovoy and Musayev did well and go with us to the second camp. The same applies to team's new players, Lunyev, Tsallagov, Mollo and Hernani. I am pleased with all the players.
The press have written that one player may leave Zenit, is it possible?
There's still a lot of time before the transfer window closes, so talking about that is still too early. It's good to review what we have. I have set myself the task to speed up the team and the players, but at the same time, make it younger. So I need a very balanced approach to this and it is good to analyze any transfers. During this periods, it is very difficult to do transfers. Teams that are in their championship and fighting for titles, do not want to let their best players go, so we need to take players who are not playing, or who are injured, or who the coach doesn't like. In the summer we'll be working on much easier transfers. All teams want to reorganize, to take new players, so it's easier for everyone.
But at the same time, if some team does decide to let their players go this winter, the amount of transfer could have doubled or even tripled compared with the last year's values. We've looked at it and I have a lot of options, which I'm looking at, but it does not stop for anyone. Let's see, there's still time.
As for the domestic championship, this time we have even more. We must first analyze our players and see if they can help us to achieve the results we want and only then I'll think about acquisitions.