Fenerbahçe Coach İsmail Kartal made a statement after the match in which they defeated Twente 1-0 in the UEFA Conference League.
Here are those words…
Ismail Kartal: We played the second leg of a game we won 5-1 in Istanbul tonight. The opponent was very motivated against us, they played hard and got the support of the fans. We knew they would provoke us. We just told our players to concentrate on our game. We saw 5 yellow cards unnecessarily in the first half, we don’t want that. We didn’t expect something like this to happen. We have to get used to them. We will play these games in the future. It shouldn’t be. As a coach, I don’t agree. We said in the second half that we need to be calmer, we can score goals, but we will play football. We tried to play with control with the moves we made. We are happy that we won. We contributed to the country score by making 6 out of 6, we remained undefeated in the groups. We are the only Turkish team to win 7 games in a row in Europe and we are happy.
Our opponent is Twente; very good, very organized, hard and running team. Let me highlight this first. They forced us in the first half, and we allowed it. We left our own business, we dealt with the opponent in the first half. There is no such thing as we will win every game, we will play well every game. Our plan worked today, we won. Congratulations to my players. We will play to keep the game in some matches and to win in some matches. Tonight’s game was such a game. We will play a very important league game in 2.5 days. We rested some players. This will always be present in our plans.