The manager was frustrated by the referring decisions and hailed his team’s performance, despite not getting anything against Levante
Villarreal manager Javi Calleja appeared in front of the media to analyse the Yellows’ defeat to Levante. The Yellows boss was annoyed by the refereeing decisions, which affected the outcome of a match filled with controversy: “They put us at a disadvantage. The two penalty decisions were very meticulous. I also don’t understand why they made them retake it. In the first penalty, the referee is next to the play, he sees it clearly and he doesn’t give it. On other occasions, the referee’s initial decision was given more weight than VAR. The second is soft and interpretable. What’s more, the referee doesn’t even look at VAR. If everything continues like this, we’re going to see a lot of penalties in each match, and they’ll keep on being retaken because it was a question of centimetres. It’s something that worries me. We can’t mess up football.”
Despite the controversy, Calleja’s side looked good and were better than their opponents: “We dominated and showed personality, we were superior to them, especially in the first half. It’s a shame that we couldn’t kill off the game. We started really well, defending well, looking dangerous in attack and creating chances. We only lacked a little bit of a killer instinct.”
Finally, the head coach underlined that now it is the time to keep a cool head and take away positives from the game: “We need to calm down and watch what we say. We need to analyse the whole match. We’re going away with our heads held high. We did a good job today and we need to go into games like that.”
