“I trust the players”: Madelón’s take after bitter end in La Plata | OneFootball

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

On the match itself, 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 blame the players for anything; they gave their all. Sometimes you get tired. At other times the substitutions worked well, but it’s not that they played badly — the flow of the match didn’t allow us to get on the ball.”

Regarding the dressing room after the dramatic 2-1 loss, the coach explained how he handled the group’s frustration: “We were talking, 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 deal with this by staying confident. I trust the players. You can have everything and suddenly end up with nothing — you have to accept it, it’s part of the game.”

Madelón was also self-critical, but he praised the team’s competitiveness: “Estudiantes has a squad that played in continental competition; they have tremendous depth. We were doing well and we still are. We lost our shape a bit at the end, maybe that’s also to the opponent’s credit. Unión was up to the task, enough to win it.”

As for the incidents at the end and the clash with the Pincha full-back, the coach tried to ease 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, and I hope it’s nothing. I don’t like getting involved in these things. We’re the team with the fewest yellow cards, we play cleanly, 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, and today the match was even. Both teams play well in midfield; we were a bit imprecise. It could have gone either way, and this time it went Estudiantes’ way. The great thing about football is that it gives you a chance to bounce back quickly. Now Newell’s is next — it’s a team trying to climb away from the bottom.”

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