Guillem Balagué

depth number nine somebody that you're from long distance and uh physicality but apart from a little bit of that but you know it all starts with something that was said briefly by uh by luis de la fuente he says that they weren't sure if capo verde were gonna actually go man to man and pressure high or defend deep but they never expected that they were gonna defend this deep really

I mean, all they had was defend, defend, defend, and one or two transitions.

That was their hope.

And they wanted more transitions.

That was what the manager of Calverde told them at halftime.

But in any case, it was mostly about defending.

So, okay, you've got a team that defends very deep on the edge of the box with nine men.

What do you do?

You set it with.

You put the wingers.

Oh, by the way, we've got four wingers.

Great.

Three of them are injured or coming out of injury.

Because the idea of the first two games against Cabo Verde and Saudi is basically that we were just going to get them ready for the bigger games, for the next stage.

So we did not use one of our wingers that was fit in Jeremy Pino.

And the substitutions came quite late based on the fact that he wanted to have in the last few minutes, 20 minutes or so, Lamin Yamal, who is as much as he can play, Nico Williams for about 15 minutes and Mikel Merino for another 20.

So he was just waiting and waiting and waiting, by which time I think the nerves of the side just made playing football even harder and harder.

And Cabo Verde were just getting bigger and bigger and taller and taller and faster and faster.

Yeah, and he does tell you that there was no connection.

He's our number nine, right?