‘I trust the players’: Madelón on the bitter end in La Plata | OneFootball

After Unión’s stoppage-time loss to Estudiantes, Leonardo Madelón gave a press conference in which, despite the result, he highlighted his team’s performance and called for calm going forward.

On how the match unfolded, the coach analyzed: “It was a game with few chances where you can’t afford to make mistakes. Estudiantes has that kind of quality. I can’t complain about the players at all, they gave their all. Sometimes you get tired; at other times, the substitutions came on well, but it’s not that they played badly, the flow of the game didn’t allow us to get hold of the ball.”

Regarding the dressing room after the dramatic 2-1 defeat, the coach explained how he handled the group’s frustration: “We talked, I let 10 minutes pass so everyone could calm down. I told them the campaign isn’t bad, we’re not doing badly, and today even getting one point would have been good. Now we have to put in a good performance against Newell’s. You work through this with confidence, I trust the players. You can go from having everything to ending up with nothing, you have to accept it, it’s part of the game.”

Madelón was also self-critical but praised the team’s competitiveness: “Estudiantes has a squad that played in the Copa, they have tremendous depth. We were doing well and we still are. We had some breakdowns at the end, maybe that’s also credit to the opponent. Unión was up to the task, good enough to win it.”

As for the incidents at the end and the clash with the Pincha full-back, the coach tried to lower the tension: “What happened at the end was with Mancuso. People are talking about some gestures he made toward our bench; I didn’t see it, I hope it was nothing. I don’t like getting involved in these things. We’re the team with the fewest yellow cards, we play clean, and it would be unfair to lose a player over an act of indiscipline.”

Finally, the coach ended with his mind on the next match in Santa Fe: “You have to stay emotionally balanced with the result. We were coming off a good run, today it was an even match, both teams play well in midfield, and we were a bit inaccurate. It could have gone either way, and this time it went Estudiantes’ way. The nice thing about football is that it gives you a chance to bounce back quickly. Now Newell’s is coming up, a team that wants to climb out of the bottom.”

This article was translated into English by Artificial Intelligence. You can read the original version in 🇪🇸 here.