Leonardo Jardim discusses team fatigue, questions short gap between matches | OneFootball

“Today’s game was important. A win with a lot of perspiration and little inspiration. The first half was better, the second half less so. Many times with bad passes, which isn’t normal for the team, but it ended up being enough to beat this opponent, who is in an uncomfortable position and treats every game like a final. We got the three points and we’re satisfied with that. I want to point out we had two days of recovery and played 50 minutes with ten players in the derby. After only two days of recovery, the wear from the derby… I believe next week we’ll be much better. I believe that after seven free days to recover and prepare the team, we’ll be much better.”

“When the team is tired, technical decisions aren’t the best. We ourselves, if we’re tired, don’t perform well at work. The players missed a lot of passes, many of them extremely important ones, like Lucas (Silva), who came off earlier and normally doesn’t miss that kind of pass. The important thing is that we earned three more points and remain within our objective, which is important.”

“We got 20 points in the first 10 games of the first half, between Mirassol and Fortaleza; now we’ve got 19. The number of points won is more or less similar. If we had beaten Sport, we’d have one more point. In a round-robin competition, it’s about performance over ten or eight months.”

“We won the game, great… but is there a need to make Cruzeiro play two days after a derby? Was it necessary to schedule Fortaleza then? Couldn’t it be tomorrow? We’re putting the players at risk… in other leagues this would be impossible; to start with, the players’ union wouldn’t allow it. Why didn’t Cruzeiro play tomorrow to get 72 hours to recover… I’m speaking for Fortaleza too. We’re putting at risk the quality of the game and the physical level of the athletes, with injury risk. Not all teams have two squads to rotate. A large part of squads in Brazil don’t have two teams. Now we have seven days doing nothing…”

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