Napoli: Conte frustrated, "We played Sunday, they played Friday" | OneFootball

Antonio Conte isn’t looking for excuses, but he gives a surgically precise snapshot of his Napoli after the 2-0 defeat in Lisbon against Benfica. Speaking to Prime Video, the azzurri coach starts with an obvious fact: the team is exhausted. “It was a tough, difficult match, on a hot pitch. We’re coming off a series of games every three days, the same players are always playing and inevitably you start to feel it. We’re coming from Sunday’s match, Benfica played on Friday, but we have to take that into account. We’ve spent a lot physically and mentally, but we have no other solution except to recover well. Today some players were tired, there’s no chance for particular rotations. Now the team needs to rest and then we’ll prepare for the match against Udine.”

Regarding concerns for the upcoming fixtures, Conte hides nothing: “Not being sharp leads you to make bad decisions, to not be as precise in the quality of your play. At the start we struggled, making mistakes. We wanted to start strong, but instead we let a ball get behind our defensive line and that scared us, taking away our confidence. We were very stretched out. It’s not that I’m not worried: I knew what the situation was and that it would continue for quite a while. You have to understand these nights when the others have more energy. We tried, but today they deserved it more than we did.”

The future? Conte sums it up clearly: moving forward with what they have. “We’ll have to face this journey with these players. I hope to get Lobotka and Gutierrez back, we don’t know when Lukaku will be available. The concern is not having the necessary energy to face these kinds of matches, today we came up a bit short.”

A clear picture: a short squad, limited energy, but no intention of backing down.

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Felice Torino

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