We won the tactical battle: Lyon coach
LISBON: Olympique Lyonnais manager Rudi Garcia said winning the tactical battle with Pep Guardiola’s side had been the key to his team’s surprise win in the Champions League quarter-final.
“With Pep, you can expect anything. We knew that Pep could concoct something to cause us problems. But in the end I think we won the tactical battle in the sense that we’ve mastered our tactical system, even if I changed it (during the match),” said Garcia. Lyon were able to exploit the space left in midfield by Guardiola’s decision to play an extra defender and when City reverted to their normal, attacking formation, the French side punished them on the break.
“I’m experiencing a lot of happiness right now ... when I see the joy in the dressing room, I tell myself that I’m in the right,” he said. “You can’t stop when you’re on such a good path. It’s not the night to talk about Bayern, but we’re only in the semi-finals, we’ve still got a few steps to go,” he said. Garcia left striker Moussa Dembele on the bench but the former Celtic forward responded with two goals after coming on in the second half. “It was a disappointment for Moussa not to start, but I told him, he was going to be very important when entering. Salvation came from the bench,” he said.
Dembele’s goals prompted wild scenes on the streets of Lyon on Saturday as fans gathered in the city centre, dancing and lighting flares to celebrate their victory over pre-match favourites City. “It was a complicated game against a very great team. For a player, there is always a little bit of sadness to start on the bench, but I made a difference,” Dembele told French television.
“We made the promise to give everything. The spirit of the group has changed, we know that we are a great team.”
Lyon’s surprise victories over Juventus and City came after the French season was halted in March and, unlike most European leagues, did not resume.
Garcia said they had made the most of that situation.
“We adapted to the suspension of Ligue 1, we had eight weeks of pre-season, it’s massive. Our fitness coach really came up with the perfect solution for our players,” he explained, while also conceding that his players tired towards the end.
“We’re developing a taste for things, but our confidence levels are growing in this squad, our results have shown that, but we’ll still be the outsiders, the underdogs against Bayern Munich,” Garcia said. “We’ll need to pull off a shock result, just as we did against Juventus and tonight against Manchester City.”
‘TACTICS NOT IMPORTANT’
Manchester City coach Pep Guardiola stood by his decision to shake up his side’s tactics in their game against Lyon after his team lost to the unfancied French outfit. Guardiola strayed from the 4-3-3 formation with which his side had outclassed Real Madrid in the last 16, instead fielding a back-three including vastly inexperienced Erik Garcia, 19, as the central defender.
“In this competition the tactics are not the most important thing,” Guardiola said. “They (Lyon) are so fast and our central defenders are not so quick so I didn’t want to leave them two versus two. We worked for three days on this, we discussed it and we reviewed this and when you play like we did in the last 20 minutes it shows the system is not the problem.”