Nuno Espirito Santo wants his Nottingham Forest players to take encouragement from the number of chances they created against Manchester City.
The Reds lost 3-0 to the reigning Premier League champions on Wednesday night, but head coach Nuno struck an upbeat tone in his post-match press conference. Despite not coming away with anything from the Etihad Stadium, the Portuguese believes the visitors have positives to build on.
A key turning point in the match came just before the half-hour mark. Bernardo Silva had put the hosts in front with eight minutes gone, but Chris Wood had a great chance to level the scores.
Instead, the New Zealand international could only fire wide and City quickly doubled their lead through Kevin De Bruyne. When Jeremy Doku added a third after the break, it all but killed the game off. Below is a look at what Nuno had to say after the final whistle.
On the result and performance…
“When you lose 3-0 and you say it was a good performance, maybe people don’t understand. So I won’t say it was a bad performance because there are positive things for us in the game.
“Of course there were a lot of bad things and mistakes. But the idea of us facing City, knowing the difficulties we were going to face, we challenged ourselves to try to press and go for the game.
“We had chances. We didn’t achieve and we lost. But us internally, I think we come out proud of ourselves because we tried. For sure, this game will allow us to grow.”
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On Wood’s chance…
“That minute was very important. It doesn’t reflect the whole game by itself but that minute was definitely very important, for sure.”
On De Bruyne making a difference for City…
“It is very difficult because of his quality. It is not only Kevin De Bruyne, they have quality all over the pitch.
“It is very difficult to control these kinds of players. It requires players to cover and help.
“I didn’t have doubts, and I don’t think anyone else had doubts, about the quality of City’s players and their manager. We knew we had a hard task ahead of us.
“I must be very honest with myself and my players, I think we went for it. OK, we lost - that can happen in football. But we challenged ourselves, and that can reflect for the next games.”
On creating chances at the Etihad…
“That is also a positive part of the game. It is not easy. And the way we created the chances, we recovered the ball in the areas we wanted to do that.
“At the beginning of the second half, even though we were 2-0 down, we went for it. We controlled, we were dominant and created chances.
“Of course when you don’t achieve and you allow space at the back, it is always hard. After the third goal it became very hard.”
On the substitution of Ryan Yates at half-time…
“It was a (tactical) decision. He is OK.”
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