On whether he understands a ‘lack of sympathy’ around the injury situation after the summer transfer business…
No, I have complete sympathy with that, for all the people who are saying this, because no-one in England is used to the fact that there are also clubs that are selling players. So usually in England when a club is buying [for] £450m, which we did, that’s adding that to the already great team you are having. But this club has a different model. That no-one wants to see that and no-one wants to understand this, that I can also understand, because fans of other teams or certain pundits don’t want to tell you that we’ve sold for £300m.
Now if then the £150m player is never available, that’s already one thing. If Giovanni Leoni has never been available because of his injury, that is already the second thing. So now we’re already going underneath what we’ve sold. Jeremie Frimpong is recently much more and more available and [Giorgi] Mamardashvili was one of the other signings for £450m, the second goalkeeper. It makes complete sense if you win the league last season and you spent £150m, not £450m, that expectations are high and those expectations were high for the pundits, for the media, for me, for the fans.
But at our club we are also looking at the situation and the things we had, the challenge we had during this season and then we might be a bit more realistic why this season has gone the way it has gone. But still it’s not good enough. No matter how many excuses I can come up with, it’s still not good enough, the position we’re in right now.
On whether the international break comes at a good time…
Yeah, it’s a break for me, maybe it’s a break for you, but it’s not a break for the players. I saw this today for the first time and maybe if I’m saying something wrong now then I’m wrong, but I thought I read today [Thomas] Tuchel, the England national team manager, said to 15 players they had to come in later during the camp. And if I am correct, but I have to read all the names one more time, those were mainly the players that have played Champions League and played so many games this season.
Unfortunately for us, it’s the only country where we don’t have internationals, so all the other ones will probably use our players again twice. I think, but it’s also something I’m going to ask our data department, that a lot of our players are in the top 10 in terms of playing minutes, because I have so many times had to play the same players because of the model we are having, because of the injuries we are having. We don’t have a big squad, we always have to come back to the same players. But these same players today showed character because I thought I saw that all the ones that played Wednesday were still able to compete in the end. Maybe not as fresh as they were Wednesday but they didn’t give up and that’s an important asset to have for the last period of the season.
On whether Kerkez was anticipating Lewis Dunk’s header for the equaliser…
Maybe he was, that’s something else, but I didn’t tell him. Maybe because he’s playing three years in the Premier League now, he knew or expected it. I do think we played a team that always wants to play football and always wants to bring the ball out from the back and have centre-backs that are calm on the ball and don’t kick every ball long. So, I think it’s nice to have a season ticket over here because this team always wants to play. Apart from the result, I liked the way we competed against each other, it was just fair play and both teams wanted to play. That’s once in a while nice to experience.