Garcia has hinted they’ll look to follow a similar plan at home, where they have only lost twice in the whole of 2023. “The idea was to set a high tempo in the pressing and force mistakes,” he added.
“Not expect mistakes, but to force mistakes. That high pressing also made us concede situations and the first [United] goal is because of that. In Spain we say ‘the blanket cannot cover everything’ and if you want to force mistakes like we did with the penalty and the red card for Casemiro, also we might face the situation we had when United scored for 1-0.
“They have quality players. If the ball isn’t always covered in our pressing, they put the ball into the space, they have good runners and clinical finishers. We want to take the risk and we didn’t plan to go 1-0 down, but we planned to put United in difficulty when they had possession.”
