Marcelino García Toral insisted the team must be ambitious and motivated to beat Rayo Vallecano (Sunday, 6:30pm CEST)

Villarreal head coach, Marcelino García Toral, appeared before the media to analyse the match against Rayo Vallecano, Matchday 33 of the 2023/24 LALIGA EA SPORTS season which will be played this Sunday, starting at 6:30pm CEST, at the Estadio de la Cerámica.

The Submarine come into the game on the back of a last-gasp win at Almería and three points to keep them alive in the fight for Europe. ‘To beat Rayo, we need to change our intensity compared to the Almeria game and be more ambitious. There is no other way. We must always have the ambition to win, be competitive and put our idea into practice. The other day we won without deserving it as much as other times. But it has also happened other times when we have deserved it and the result was a draw or defeat”, emphasises Marcelino.

With regard to the European positions, Marcelino doesn’t allow any distractions and focuses on his own team’s results: ‘The first way forward is to win ourselves. We can’t get distracted by the results of others. To have a chance in the last two games we have to have won four games before then. There are 18 points left and we need a lot of points to get there. The first thing will be to change the numbers at home. We can’t accumulate more defeats than wins. We mustn’t look at the others because we are now at a disadvantage and we have to win to reduce it.”

As for Rayo, the Asturian coach warns that he expects an intense and competitive team: ‘They are a team capable of getting good results away from home. They are close to staying up. We expect a tense team, who come to win and leave us little time to think and execute. They will try to stop us from progressing easily. We need to be focused and mobile.”

Finally, the Yellows coach appealed to the fans to come and cheer his team on against the Madrid side: ‘Their support is always important and that they are with us. Our numbers at home are not what they should be. We have not been a reliable team at home and it has been difficult for us to transmit that passion to the fans. The fans could have become disillusioned. We have to take the first step, but we ask them to support us because that always gives the team a lot.”