The Manager highlighted that, despite the difficulty of the match against AS Roma, Villarreal never gave up

After the tie against AS Roma, in which the Yellows won the second leg (0-1) but ended up getting knocked out after the 0-4 thrashing in the first leg, the Villarreal Manager, Fran Escribá, explained that he was happy with the group, who knew how to confront the match despite its difficulty. “I’m satisfied with the group. If their best player was their goalkeeper, that says a lot for Villarreal. When the tie was already lost, the team kept going in search of the second and this says a lot about them. During the match, I didn’t want to think about the tie, we were thinking about scoring the second not the fourth. The strategy was to focus on not driving ourselves mad trying to score, we had to look to score just as we did, the fact that we did not score any more goals is due to the goalkeepers’ great performance. We have to accept that we came here off the back of a very bad result [in the first leg] which is what eliminated us”.

Furthermore, the Manager stated that the changes in the side were necessary and that everyone played well. “I was sure that the less regular players were going to take it like they did. If I hadn’t thought they were going to play like that I wouldn’t have used them. The team came from putting in a big, very important effort [against Real Sociedad] and I knew that playing with our normal starters was not going to give us anything more. We saw the best of Santos Borré. To have a player like Soldado freeing up spaces was key and Rafa made the most of them and played really well”.