Vilanova talks (1): "I'm convinced we'll win the Liga"

Barcelona assistant coach Tito Vilanova talked in an interview with Catalan sports paper El Mundo Deportivo about the team and the season so far.


What is your function?
Together with the other members of the staff, I organize the training session, I prepare the matches by watching videos of the opponents and I advise Guardiola.

Why are you convinced that Barcelona will win the Liga?
Because I see the players train every day with a lot of motivation. You don't have to talk to them about their attitude, maybe even the opposite. Gudjohnsen for example didn't have to come to the training on Monday but he had a very good voluntarily session.

Which quality of Guardiola will make the group overcome the last two defeats?
One defeat as I'm concerned, because I see the Wisla game as a 4-1 win. Pep loves football, he knows this club better than anybody and he knows what he wants to do and how he wants to do it. He knows how to motivate the players at the right moment.

Being a man of the club gives him more credit?
No, at the contrary, it never has. Someone coming from outside would have been given more credit. And certainly with the current sitution, there's no margin for errors.

The 1-0 against Numancia was an unexpected blow?
We knew that they would give us the whole pitch and they had the luck that they could score soon. It wasn't easy, but to say it simple, it's a reality that we had five or six clear chances that could easily have lead to three or four goals.

Have you seen that the group took a lack of confidence in away games with them from last season?
I would like to link the game in Poland to the 4-0 of the first game, which makes it a different game. In both games we created ten clear chances. With Eto'o, Messi, Bojan and Henry, you normally score three or four goals then. Against Numancia the problem was that we wanted too much instead of waiting and being more calm.

The player who is the least patient waiting for the ball is Messi?
Today there are no natural wingers anymore because we play a different system than all other teams in the world. The other clubs don't need wingers, so they just don't exist. We put players on the wing because they can play there but at the same time they are more used to play in the centre. Leo did quite good what we asked from him during the pre-season.


In the coming days, you'll have the other parts of this interview with Vilanova talking, amongst other things, about the 4-3-3 system and the position of Thierry Henry.