Mancini: Galatasaray triumph 'for the fans'
Wednesday, December 11, 2013
Article summary
Roberto Mancini dedicated Galatasaray AŞ's win over Juventus to "the trust of the 40,000 fans" at the rearranged game while Antonio Conte rued the visitors' earlier lapses.
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Roberto Mancini, Galatasaray coach
Obviously it was a hard match, but when you analyse the whole game we deserved this scoreline. I think last year's group was easier; this year we had Real Madrid and Juventus. We have accomplished a very important mission. This victory has to be dedicated to our fans. They were here last night and today they were here again – 40,000 of them. Their trust was great for us.
Finally we won the match. A draw was enough for Juventus and because of that they played a bit more defensively – we were the team who tried to make more chances and wanted to played more offensively. We did well with the opportunities we had and I'm extremely happy we're going to the next stage because qualifying was very difficult. This isn't a success though: winning something is a success, this is one piece of the process and I'm happy we managed it. I want to thank my team for picking up points in the group matches, but the next stage will be very difficult and we'll face very tough times.
I'm delighted, not just because this win came against an Italian team but because me and Galatasaray have adapted well to each other in a short time and this brought us today's victory. This wasn't our best performance, we played better against København here, but today we were solid and stable in defence and didn't concede a goal, which shows how we've improved. We'll continue like that. Today we saw a very motivated and very strong team who showed their soul.
Juventus have strong players and they're not just a good team – they're a very, very good team, a very strong team. Of course we have good players like Burak [Yılmaz], [Didier] Drogba and [Wesley] Sneijder but we can't forget that [Juve's quality], so we have to be happy to advance from a group including Real Madrid and Juventus.
Antonio Conte, Juventus coach
I congratulate my players because they could not do much more today, but I still regret that we came into this last match of the group stage without having already qualified. We made our lives more complicated by wasting too many opportunities in the previous games. You never know what can happen in a game so we are to blame for not having secured qualification before.
We didn't have many shots on goal and made a mistake when Galatasaray scored because we found ourselves three against three and it is always dangerous in this kind of situation. We are disappointed with the way we were eliminated from the competition, but now we have to focus on the domestic league and the Europa League.