Italy's Mangia: Did I celebrate? I did not care!
Wednesday, June 5, 2013
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Devis Mangia was unashamed with his celebrations after Italy's late winner against England, whose manager Stuart Pearce promised no "hollering" despite a below-par display.
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Devis Mangia, Italy coach
Did I celebrate [when we scored]? I did not care. It was my first match as coach at a European Championship. At the beginning there was a little bit of tension and we made some mistakes, but then the team improved –we had a lot of opportunities. In the first ten minutes of the second half we had some difficulties but then the team came again.
This has been a very good result to start the tournament but we have not done anything yet. The players added to the squad, like [Marco] Verratti and [Mattia] Destro, have joined in with the team spirit. Verratti is an intelligent guy and from the very first training session he has joined in with the team. Once again I want to thank Cesare Prandelli for allowing him to join me here.
Lorenzo Insigne simply reminded me of Lorenzo Insigne today. I never wish to mention particular players because all 23 players know I completely trust them.
Stuart Pearce, England manager
The performance was very poor and the best team won. The movement of their front line is very clever – they run in behind, they're tireless workers. We stuck at it, we were genuine – as you'd expect us to be – but there wasn't that quality. Too many players didn't deliver the performance we were hoping for. It was unlike us – we've been playing very well – and we'll have to learn from it going into Saturday's game. We took them on and we didn't have enough quality to beat them tonight.
I felt we could have caused the Italians problems if we'd have been a bit more cultured with our final pass. I always give you an honest assessment – it wasn't good enough and the players know that. We need to be strong enough to say we were beaten by a better team tonight. Some of our players didn't really show their quality on the ball. Angry isn't the word – I need to analyse things, no stomping and shouting and hollering in our dressing room.
[Wilfried] Zaha certainly wasn't ready tonight. We'll have a look at him again in training. Now we're probably in a three-game group – us, Norway and Israel – and they've got a march on us. I think we'll probably have to win both games, but that's tournament football.
