What does this match mean to you? What do you feel?
I’d like to thank everyone for a warm welcome. I expected something like that, I saw the messages on social media and the excitement about the game. We realized it would be difficult for us, Zenit are obviously a strong opponent, but we took Zenit preparing to play against Malmö and the previous matches into consideration and had an idea how to play against them. We had an idea of their technique and we weren’t wrong about it. Still, the red card made things easier for Zenit and harder for us. Were you surprised that Rakitskyi played from the left tonight and Douglas was in the midfield?
Getting ready for Malmö previously, Zenit used a formation where Rakitskiy played on the left and started attacks and Douglas pushed up in the midfield. At the beginning of the match today we figured out how they'd play in attack. The location of the players in defence was irrelevant to us. Some of our players saw the support from the fans for Zenit and this affected us, as did the red card. All of the positive emotions we had had at the beginning just faded away.
Will Petrus Boumal suffer any consequences for the poor discipline? Could anyone else take his place?
Someone always can fill a place. From what we saw at the training we thought Boumal was ready. We all make mistakes. Boumal wasn’t bad today attacking, apart from the times when he made the wrong decisions. When we were playing without the ball, when we were defending ourselves, he showed poor discipline. We don’t know how the other players would have behaved in his place. He should have done better.
The teams playing against Zenit often use a deep defence. You were bolder. Why?
The most important thing for us is that we want to play football. We have to seize the moment, we are now among the elite of Russian football. We can play a deep defensive system and hope for a counterattack, but we tried something different. I think today, being ready psychologically, we managed to attack our opponent. We did make mistakes, but we looked good before the red card. After that Zenit relaxed. But we’d rather play this way than defend the entire game and concede in the last minute, as happened against Lokomotiv. We’ll analyse the game and our mistakes. Such mistakes affect us a lot in a match against such teams.
