Unai Emery acknowledges that the team were not comfortable against Real Sociedad
Villarreal CF coach Unai Emery admitted that his team didn’t find a way to hurt Real Sociedad at the Reale Arena, beyond trying hard in the second half: “There were two match plans conditioned by Real Sociedad. In the first half we played further back than we wanted to and it was difficult for us to get out. The key was to get on the counter-attack and we didn’t. In the second half we had to do something else. In the second half we had to do something else. We tried to go forward and open the game up a bit more. We had our chances, but they didn’t go in. Our first half was poor and I take responsibility for that. We weren’t able to hurt them. They were better than us throughout the game.”
According to Emery, it’s time to look to the future with optimism: “We’ve played eight games, six of them away from home. We knew it was a difficult challenge. We’ll be cautiously optimistic because we’ll have more home games to come. We’re not comfortable in the standings, but we’re calm enough to continue working on certain aspects.”
To conclude, the Basque manager analysed his opponent in the following way: “Real Sociedad have evolved in terms of the way they play with Imanol. He has taken risks with this idea of play and it’s not easy to do that.”
