You had a tough win in Krasnodar, it took the team two days just to travel there and back. How will this affect training?
The most important thing for us now is to recover. It wasn’t an easy trip to Krasnodar, but we’re used to this travel now, so there are no issues with that. We have to recover our energy and understand who’s in what condition, and decide how serious any injuries are, we then need to choose the squad that will play in the Cup match against Spartak.
How important is the one goal advantage in a Cup match like this, will it allow you to save energy or experiment with your starting lineup?
It won’t allow us to save energy or experiment. This is a small advantage, but an advantage all the same, but it is so small that we don’t need to talk about it.
The Spartak manager Guillermo Abascal was fired yesterday, how much of a surprise was this news to you and how did you react to it?
That’s up to the management of Spartak to make those decisions. Managers have to be ready to be ready to resign or be fired at any time. Guillermo is a good manager and did well. The games at their training camp and some matches in the league were successful. Maybe his team lacked some stability and they didn’t get the results demand. Everyone expects Spartak to always be challenging for the top positions.
Who definitely won’t be available for this match?
Now we can only say that definitely Mario (Fernandes) is unavailable, but he’ll start rehabilitation in the near future and we'll see how long that lasts. The rest of the players are available to play to one level or another. The previous match was quite rough and difficult, so some of our players have some minor issues.
Can we expect to see some squad rotation before this game?
We’ll look at the condition of the players. We must understand who is in what condition and choose our best possible starting team. There will probably be some rotation, if it’s big or not will depend on the condition of the players.
Could Spartak losing their manager effect the game?
It’s always difficult to guess as a new manager always means a new mentality. It will be more difficult for us to prepare for the match because we don’t know which formation he will prefer and which players he likes more. Players who have previously not played so much, now have a better chance to show what they can do. As a rule, we normally see teams show more emotion after this, but it’s very difficult to guess, but we know one thing, this is a Russian Cup match in which everything else is secondary. The only thing that matters is the game and what happens on the pitch.
