Cremonese, Ballardini: “It will be a good test, we will face it as best we can”

The coach spoke at the press conference on the eve of the match against Napoli

Cremonese will be a guest tomorrow at 20.45 in Luciano Spalletti’s Napoli, who is back from the victory with Spezia. After the defeat against Lecce, coach Davide Ballardini presents the Maradona match in the press conference on the eve of this: “Finally we worked for a whole week. It was a good week of training for those who are well and have had the opportunity to train. while others will not be available. How is the team? The feeling is that we are all very disappointed because it was an important match, but the reaction was good because I see the commitment and desire to do better and well. But it is fair to say that the Cremonese “It’s the only team that played Wednesday evening in Rome and then played on Saturday at 3 pm. If it happened to a big team, all hell would happen. We take the consequences of not being able to play a match in the best conditions. Abyss between Naples and Cremonese in the standings? True, but I also felt that in Rome it would have been better to lose: it’s silly. We would have lost energy anyway, we would have returned at five in the morning anyway. play a good game and then you also hear that it was better to lose… Napoli is a team that we met in the Cup, perhaps with several players who are not always regulars, but are part of a very important squad and are players of great thickness. Tomorrow we will find a team that is certainly as focused as it has been since the beginning of the championship. It will be a good test for us, a huge exam and we will try to face it in the best possible way”.

“Does the ranking position weigh on a mental level? It weighs because the dissatisfaction is great – explains the grey-red coach -, but the only way to change things is this. Commitment, the desire to compete and do better, because it’s the only way. We have a group of guys who are committed and want to do well. Dessers and Okereke not at their best? As forwards we have Afena-Gyan, Ciofani and Tsadjout. The coach must make mistakes as little as possible, but here perhaps we exaggerate. In this case there are no great doubts. If I agree with Ciofani who spoke of a fragile team, little in confidence? It’s true, but at the same time we spent almost all of our energy in Rome, there was no way to recover and when you go down in a situation like ours in which you have little physical and even less mental energy it can happen, but it doesn’t have to be like that. With Lecce it happened because we didn’t have the energy to play the match we were supposed to play, we needed to be intense and give depth to the game. We really didn’t have the energy, Lecce made you play and you were slow and predictable, even if more or less nothing happened for 60 minutes. If you are physically well and you are focused with your head, this should not happen”.

“To manage the match you need qualities and personalities that in Serie A don’t have many teams – continues Ballardini -. For me, Cremonese is a team that can have the attention, humility and quality of play to do well even against the teams of his level.For example, I’ve seen the team play on an equal footing with Lecce, with Spezia, with Bologna, with Empoli… I see all these differences between the Cremonese who play against I haven’t seen the big names, it’s clear that against the latter they have more possession, but the Cremonese keep the field well and when they have the ball, having more space, they try to counter in depth. Attack a striker tomorrow? I don’t think so. the idea, however, is to have two strikers. Because then they have to be the first defenders, we have some who are very good from this point of view.”