“Do you speak English?”: Barcelona boss’s jibe that riled Paredes | OneFootball

After Boca’s tough 1-0 defeat to Barcelona in the Copa Libertadores, Leandro Paredes was involved in a heated exchange with the Ecuadorian team’s coach, César Farías. Seconds before the Boca captain spoke to the press, the coach approached him and asked, “Do you speak English?” Speaking in front of the microphones, the World Cup winner replied: “I don’t know who he is, he must know me from somewhere.”

As Paredes was getting ready to speak to the press after the loss, Farías came up behind the camera and said something that at first was not picked up by the microphones. However, the journalists present at the Monumental Banco Pichincha in Guayaquil managed to catch the Venezuelan’s question in English.

When asked about it, Boca’s captain gave a sharp response: “I don’t know what he said. I have a lot of respect, I never talk, neither before nor after. He must know me from somewhere, I don’t know who he is. It doesn’t matter.”

During the match, Paredes was also involved in a tense incident with one of the coach’s assistants in the first half. There, at a throw-in, Grenddy Perozo, one of Farías’s assistants, had the ball and was not giving it back, to which Paredes said: “Do you want to play? Since you never did…”

That moment was caught on camera and, although it is hard to know whether it triggered Farías’s words toward Paredes, it made it clear that the atmosphere in Ecuador was extremely tense.

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