Napoli are set to face Sporting CP at home in the 2nd round of the group stage of the Champions League. Ahead of the match, Napoli manager Antonio Conte gave an interview to Camel Live.
Conte said in the interview:
“This is an important match against a very good team—Sporting CP are league champions. Together with Benfica and Porto, they represent the top level of Portuguese football. We lost against Manchester City, but that was a special game because Di Lorenzo was sent off. We had very limited time to prepare, and we got back late from Milan: the players who featured yesterday had recovery training.”
“Reasons for the defeat? We conducted a very in-depth analysis of the game, and the conclusion is: we played better in this game than when we faced Milan last year.
Although we won that game last year, the process was tough, while this time we had the initiative—we just weren’t focused enough like we used to be. We have to do better in certain situations and improve ourselves.”
When talking about the situations of Spinazzola and Oliveira:
“They had individual training yesterday, and we’ll take another look today—if we need to take a risk, we have to, because we don’t have many options. A possible replacement could be playing Elmas at full-back.”
Finally, Conte spoke again about the incident where De Bruyne expressed dissatisfaction with being substituted during the match against Milan:
“This isn’t a case targeting a specific player. People who know me understand my stance on certain behaviors. My job is to restore order and reaffirm some principles: some things can be tolerated once, but not the second time.”
