We have won as a team and these three points give us a boost in morale, added the coach.
Zinedine Zidane appeared in the press room at the Santiago Bernabeu stadium and spoke about the LaLiga victory in the Clásico: We deserved the victory because of everything we did both defensively and offensively. The first half was even and our press up front was not perfect. In the second half we improved our press and we were better up top. We really pushed them hard and almost overwhelmed them. These are three important points because it has been a difficult week and today we had the opportunity to change that. It’s three points and we regained the lead, but we’re going to have to fight to the end.
We’re happy because we’ve all shown that we’ve done very well and I’m proud of them because it’s not easy to win like this. Our strength today was very important. The first thing is to defend well together and then we know that at any moment we can have opportunities to score goals. The second half was ours. We had a lot of chances to score and we netted twice. We kept a clean sheet and Courtois was instrumental in that. We won the game as a team today.
Vinicius Jr.
He was good and he scored an important goal in an important game. I’m happy for him. He was good offensively and defensively he did a great job helping Marcelo with Semedo. He has conditions, but he is very young and sometimes the criticism is difficult. He has to live with that because he is at Real Madrid.
The win boosted our morale. We spoke about how the game was an opportunity to change our run and in the end, we changed it all thanks to this week’s hard work. We knew we could play a good game out there and we did it. We deserved to win, but it was tough against a top rival. We know there will be tougher moments and people will try to knock us, but we’re used to that.
A great performance from Courtois
It’s not just tonight that he has been good. For some time now he has been doing well and having him in goal makes us all a lot calmer. Today he has made huge saves and that kept us in the game. Those saves at key moments are crucial really.
Mariano
He’s our third choice forward. Today he got a chance and he did so well. He’s not had many minutes so far and I was blown away by his goal. All of these players are key and I will think about all the options. There are players who feature less, but we all need to contribute something to this team. Today Mariano did well. Isco has been terrific, he nearly scored that goal but Ter Stegen did well to stop it. And Courtois was great today.
The game against Manchester City
We will be ready for the second leg, although there are still league games before that game. The reaction today has been important. The dressing room is not suffering. It was a complicated week, but we prepared for this game well. That means the players are in and want it. We played 78 very good minutes and in the end we lost. Today we won playing well from start to finish. We need to stick to what we believe in, but we know that it will be hard until the very end. We need to prove ourselves every time we play.
