Martinez: ‘We’ll have to put in a perfect performance to beat West Ham again’

For the Olympiakos game with West Ham in London (9/11, 22:00) he spoke at the press conference Diego Martinez.

The coach of the “red whites” said that his team will have to do the perfect match to be able to leave the English capital with victory, while he also talked about the game against PAOK.

His statements in detail:

On whether the match is a challenge and whether Olympiacos will come in with a desire to surprise the opponent:

“Olympiacos is a team that always wants to win. We have come here with great appetite. We have earned the right to be here. It’s a very important night with a Premier League opponent. Tomorrow we will have to play more than a perfect match to succeed. If we played a perfect match at home, we must do something more tomorrow. Because I heard the question about Rodney after the bad league match there was self-criticism. It’s part of our job. There’s always that. It’s part of the process we have to go through to improve. We always want to be better in the next game. We are waiting for it to do our best. In football there are surprises and that is the beauty of it. We also saw in the Champions League (surprises). We are here with great motivation for a very good performance. Even after the defeat by PAOK, the goal is to continue. I have a lot of faith in the potential of our players and our team. We have great faith in our team.”

About the match with PAOK and what went wrong:

“It’s really one of the few bad games we’ve had this year. For this we feel very bad and we are very angry with ourselves. As we said and then there are no excuses. We played very badly. The game was up to 0-2 and then 0-2 at two-a-side level. In two strands. There is a very balanced first half if Pontense had scored and if El Kaabi’s goal had not been disallowed we would be talking about another game. It’s an explanation for the game but we also saw what we didn’t do well. As I have said I am the first in defeats in terms of responsibility and the last in victories. I take the responsibility. We tried until the end. We fought it to the end. We didn’t give up even with a player in another position to give extra aggression and to have depth. I feel proud of the effort made. And those 2 goals we scored you never know until the end of the year – even though we are hurt – they might matter. The most important thing is to learn from your mistakes. As Rodney said, in football there are also bad moments. Great athletes like Nadal became champions through bad times. It’s a very bad defeat but among many good moments. It was a bad game but the team is not in a good moment. If you want any regular question I’m here to answer whatever you want. I like to talk about football.”

On the importance of the match:

“We were really full of expectations and ambitions in all the games. Before every match we wanted to win just like now. We know how we will face a big rival and a Conference holder who before our game had a streak of 17 games without defeat. Every match is very important for us. The next game is always more important for us.”