Unai Emery: We Lost Control After The Red Card

By The Editor
on 7th March 2019

Unai Emery bemoans lack of control of possession after we were reduced to 10 men…

Unai Emery bemoaned our lack of control following Sokratis’ sending off in our damaging 3-1 defeat at Rennes as our Europa League hopes to hang in the balance, BT Sport reports.

We started off the tie in the ascendency and it seemed as though every one of our attacks would bear a clear-cut chance with Emery going with a 4-2-3-1 system.

Alex Iwobi gave us a goal to show for our dominance after his cross-come-shot snuck in at the back post to put us in a commanding position.

However, just as we witnessed in the derby last weekend, two pathetic pieces of defending turned the whole match on its head and placed us on the back foot.

Sokratis decided to stop two counter-attacks in a cynical fashion and was given a yellow on each occasion, with his second booking coming minutes before half-time.

Rennes would go on to equalise from the resulting corner and we then hit the self-destruct button.

Emery didn’t make a defensive change following the sending off, opting to move Henrikh Mkhitaryan to right-back and shifting Shkodran Mustafi back to his natural position.

“We controlled the first 40 minutes of the game. After the red card, we could not control it,” Emery was quoted as saying.

“We wanted to hold the positioning with one player less, but also take chances to transition or to get possession around the box. We had one chance with Mesut [Ozil] but it’s [not] enough.

“When it was 2-1, thinking it’s difficult to have a better result, we wanted to hold it but, the transition is another bad action for us and they won.”

Despite the defeat, Emery has reaffirmed his belief that we’re a different animal at home and fully back us to turn this tie around at the Emirates.

“They won the first 90 minutes, but we have another 90 minutes at home with our supporters and we want to think positive now. It will be 11 against 11 and when we were playing 11 against 11 the team was playing well.”