Villarreal manager Unai Emery has attributed their 3-2 loss to Liverpool partly to the injury of Gerard Moreno at the Estadio de la Cerámica on Tuesday evening in the UEFA Champions League semifinal second leg.
Emery said Moreno’s absence left his team weak, as he was the on-field leader against the English side who are ironically his former employers.
“We knew we had to play a very physical game. We had to get into duels and there we defused them and matched their intensity. We had to make them see that they could suffer. Gerard Moreno’s injury left us without a leader on the pitch,” the ex-Arsenal manager told Villarreal website.
The ex-PSG boss said they tried to match Liverpool’s intensity and physicality but lacked perfection in both legs.
“When you play a semi-final, you need to be close to perfect,” Emery said.
“In two matches, I can sum up 45 minutes at a good defensive level there, 45 bad minutes at 2-0. Offensively, we couldn’t do anything else, but we had a good result. The aim for today was to try and score the first goal to get closer to the comeback. The second goal strengthened us a lot, because in the first half, we dug in a lot, which could have affected us.”