The Argentine assures “our intention is to gain more points than we did in the first round of fixtures”
Mateo Musacchio returned to the pitch on 3rd December 2015 after overcoming a serious ankle injury, sustained on 12th April 2015 in Getafe. Seven months after he was in the starting eleven and played 90 minutes in the Copa del Rey duel in El Alcoraz (3-2).
From then on, Mateo Musacchio has burst into the side with great strength once again, and is very much a fundamental pillar for the Submarine, playing 552 minutes in La Liga, 259 in the Copa del Rey and 90 in the UEFA Europa League. “I am playing consistently and getting minutes. I am happy and I just have to try to keep up this form. All the players on this Villarreal team are playing to a high level”, he commented.
For the Yellow number 5, the draw earned against Betis has not knocked Vilarreal’s moral, they remain in fourth in the league and are still alive in European football: “We are doing well. We are fourth and that’s really good. We’re very happy. If we equal our first half of the season performance it is really good. We have to keep up this dynamic, we’ve gone seven games without a loss now, with six wins and a draw”.
With 39 points Villarreal equalled their best first round of league fixtures in history. With this in mind, Musacchio is ambitious for the future: “Our mentality now is to gain the same points or more than we did in the first round of games. All teams bring something different and so this is a very difficult task. So we are not going to drive ourselves crazy by thinking further ahead than the next match”.
In terms of the path to continue on now, the Argentinean defender strongly believes that the team’s success is based off of their defensive strength: “The most important thing is to be strong at the back. Our defensive statistics are very good and up front too, even in spite of the fact that we couldn’t score against Betis. We try to make sure that we don’t concede because we know that with the players we’ve got up top one will find the back of the net. Sometimes it doesn’t work out, but there are very few games in which we don’t score. If we are good in defence we will almost always get points”.
To finish, Musacchio analysed the next league fixture against Espanyol (Saturday, 18:15 CET): “These types of games are always intense. It will be a very good game. We are going with the intention to win and we hope the result will be positive for us. El Espanyol have great players, but so do we. We are focusing more on our game than theirs”.
