On how pleased he was to see the first three goals scored from corners and his team’s general improvement in set-pieces…
That’s very pleasing. First of all, because that’s the reason why we won [and] second of all, because when I was just standing around your colleagues people said, ‘Well played, well played,’ and I said, ‘In my opinion, we’ve played better this season.’ We played OK to good – so, we were OK to good but it wasn’t the best game of the season. We’ve played better when we’ve lost [and] we’ve played better when we conceded set-pieces.
But as I always said, things went back to normal. We created quite a lot of chances from set-pieces in the first part of the season and almost every set-piece we conceded went in, and today you could see exactly the opposite happening. I think one of their first big chances was a set-piece that would have gone in in the first six or seven months [of the season], 100 per cent sure. But now we did it and we start scoring from set-pieces and then things look much brighter and better than when you don’t, and that’s really pleasing for us, for the team and for our fans as well.
On what has changed with Liverpool and set-pieces…
Things went back to normal, mainly, because I just said that we’ve created quite a lot of chances in the first half of the season that constantly did not go in, or too many times did not go in with being unlucky. We were a lot of times very close. And even today we conceded the set-piece, they scored one and they could have scored a second one in the first half – that would have been the first one, but you know what I mean.
Maybe one or two small details have changed defensively and offensively, I think we are set up slightly, slightly different. But the biggest reason is that things go back to normal. There was a period of time that we were 23 goals behind Arsenal in set-pieces, including penalties, by the way. And we’re still not only three goals away from them but we’ve closed the gap a little bit. Although you never know what can happen this weekend with Arsenal because I wouldn’t be surprised if they scored three from set-pieces this weekend as well.
