On the ending…

My emotions were emotions of happiness and relief. This is probably the first time I have to do a different post-match press conference than I did throughout all these other games, because today we did not play a good game. The performance, especially in the first half, was not as we’ve had so many times this season. But we’ve been on the wrong side of the score after a good performance far too many times. Today, I think we got more than we deserved. A draw would have been a fairer result of this game than for us to win it.

But then you think you win it because Hugo [Ekitike] already got a big, big, big chance from a great cross from Rio Ngumoha, misses it, the ball comes back, goes into the net. Since VAR is there, I always struggle to celebrate too much if I think, ‘There might be something going on.’ You never know if a ball has hit the body where it ended up. Apparently it ended up on his arm, so it was disallowed.

Then my emotions were, ‘OK, still not everything that could have gone against us this season has happened yet. Still one more to go.’ But maybe fortune has changed two or three minutes later where again we thought we scored the winner, again they took a long time to check it, but this time the referee pointed at the kick-off – which meant that we won the game.

On Dominik Szoboszlai’s play in the build-up to the goal…

I think there you can see how much confidence he has at the moment and how well he has played this season, because it’s the last second of the game – at least I thought it was the last second of the game. Apparently it was a bit longer to go because after we scored we still played for one more minute. But it felt to me when I looked at the time that it was the last moment and to stay so cool in a moment where everyone, all the fans, were expecting the ball to come in and he was waiting, waiting, and in the end he brought it in.

Well done by Virgil [van Dijk] as well, to change the angle of attack to go to the second post. And Macca was not a surprise to me that he was both times our goalscorer because he played with the mentality you need to play in these games and that’s why he was twice in that situation to finish. The first half was really poor, the worst we’ve played until now I think, but the second half was much better, controlled the game much more, had our chances already earlier in the second half. And in the first half, although we were really poor, we did not concede a lot and we defended really well in our box.

On what he said to his players at half-time…

What I just said – that it was the worst first half we’ve played. But we defended our box really well and that was the reason that we were still on 0-0. Because as much as Forest were the better team and were forcing us to go back, we defended really well in our box, in my opinion. We had to defend a lot of set-pieces throughout the whole game but especially in the first half. So if we could bring back that mentality to the whole pitch, combined [with] doing a few things better on the ball and maybe not lose every ball you touch, because that was almost what happened, then you know that these players can do better.

I tried to give them a bit of energy to say, ‘They’ve played Thursday, a difficult away game, maybe they run out of energy and we for sure cannot have run out of energy yet, so maybe that can balance the game more or get the game in our advantage.’ And I pointed out our second half against [Manchester] City as well, after a first half that’s maybe not of the standards we would like to [have], we are able to play a much better second half.