FCBARCELONA.CAT

30.01.2009 00:51

Guardiola: “It was hard for us”

Vanessa Forns

After qualifying for the semi finals of the cup, Josep Guardiola admitted it hadn’t been easy to beat Espanyol and that the players had had to put every effort into securing qualification.

The Barça manager was delighted with the way his team performed tonight at the Camp Nou, saying “we won the game through effort. We fund it very hard to beat Espanyol. That’s the cup, that’s knockout tournaments. A team’s losing 3-0 and they have no other choice but to push forward. The lesson will serve us well, we can’t relax because any goal can penalise us a lot”.

Guardiola also considers that his squad is “under a lot of pressure that is why I value performances like these so much. It is hard to win and there is this wrong idea that we should win each game by loads of goals”.

As expected

Josep Guardiola was in no way surprised by the way Espanyol played in both legs of this quarter final tie. “I expected a game like this. Espanyol are an aggressive team, a good team that does things right, they cut down the play well. And they have talented players like Callejón and Coro”. He also made it patently clear that he wishes Pochettino and his side “a lot of luck in what is left of the league”.

Fans so important

The fans turned out in force to support Barça on their way to the cup semi finals, An impressive 78,000 were there in the Camp Nou and Guardiola was sure that “if there hadn’t been so many people, we wouldn’t have got through this tie”. He added that “we can’t do it on our own. We need the fans.”

Bojan’s performance

Without a shadow of a doubt, one of the men of the night was Bojan, who scored two of his team’s three goals. Guardiola said he was delighted for the player, adding that “ he needs to go on like this. His second goal was really nice. We are luckily to have him”.

Ready for the next challenge

Guardiola already has his mind on the weekend trip to Racing Santander. That’s a game where he feels “we’ll need to put a special effort” to ensure the three points. He knows that the players will be tired after playing eight games in just 24 days.

But Guardiola still called upon that old word ‘prudence’. He made it clear that “if it was that easy to win the treble, we’d have done it several times over our 109 years of history, but it hasn’t been like that, Things are not that easy”.