Speaking after his Marseille side’s 1-1 draw against Nice last night, manager Jorge Sampaoli concluded that the result was a fair reflection on the balance of play.
His words transcribed in L’Équipe, the Argentine also discussed his tactical decisions to counter Christophe Galtier’s 4-4-2 as well as the fitness constraints in his team selection.
“It’s a fair result. The first half was for Nice, and the second for us, we could have won. We are on a run of difficult and important games. Now we’ll have to recover to approach the next game well [against Clermont on Sunday].”
“We wanted to place our full-backs further back in order to give our opponent trouble, so that they had spaces in behind them. We managed to do that better in the second half. We had some chances, we could have won, but the change in structure was made with regard to the players who were at 100% match fitness.”
“[Cengiz Ünder and Valentin Rongier] were not ready physically, they’ve played a lot recently, they were risking an injury. Same for Luan Peres, we wanted to play Amavi as much as possible but he had a cramp and had to leave earlier. As for Dimitri Payet, he is playing often right now, and can seem tired. But his impact on our play is fundamental, he can make the difference at any time.”