Napoli boss Maurizio Sarri believes “the pressure’s all on Real Madrid” ahead of Tuesday’s Champions League last-16 clash at the San Paolo.
Napoli trail Madrid 3-1 from the first leg but approach the game in good stead, having beaten Serie A rivals Roma 2-1 over the weekend.
“We’re united by necessity, now our common goal is to do well,” the Coach said at a Press conference.
“My meeting with the President? In half an hour, we talked about 28 films, football for about 30 seconds.
Napoli boss Maurizio Sarri believes “the pressure’s all on Real Madrid” ahead of Tuesday’s Champions League last-16 clash at the San Paolo.
Napoli trail Madrid 3-1 from the first leg but approach the game in good stead, having beaten Serie A rivals Roma 2-1 over the weekend.
“We’re united by necessity, now our common goal is to do well,” the Coach said at a Press conference.
“My meeting with the President? In half an hour, we talked about 28 films, football for about 30 seconds.
“The pressure’s all on Real Madrid, they’re the world champions and are obliged to win.
“Still, we have the best fans in the world. It seems almost impossible that they’ll score for 46 consecutive games, but we can make it a very difficult evening for them.
“It may be that we’ll play a bit of balls. The game will be difficult for the technical qualities that Real Madrid have, plus their great physical qualities.
“The most important aspect is that of defence, although we must try to win. We must play with a great defence because it’ll be difficult to contain them.
“We’ll have our chances in attack. In these types of games, we shouldn’t think about how many chances we’ll get, instead exploiting the ones we do get.
“Mertens’ condition? He’s fine, he only had cramps, but we’ll assess him.
“I don’t want controversy, but the calendar certainly hasn’t helped us. Certainly, from this point of view, it could be better.
“We’ve done very well for 86 minutes against Roma, after that we started panicking.
“We mustn’t lose focus. It’d already happened in Turin, becoming overwhelmed by certain incidents, although it shouldn’t happen regardless.
“When you face a top team like Madrid, they play with surgical precision and it’s difficult to talk about the defensive phase in some of their situations.
“We’ll have to protect the ball and make them play fewer balls into space.
“Rog? He’s on his way. He didn’t know the language and our food at the beginning, but he’s grown a lot in recent months and we hold him in high esteem.
“Napoli’s Achilles heel? We lost a few balls when Roma came to us to press high, but that’s the way we play. From that, we look to take advantages of a game’s development.
“If we apply pressure first, we’ll have the chance of launching our attack.”