Phillip Cocu, PSV’s head trainer, is very pleased with his team and his reserve players. He was also very happy to see that a specific form of training was put to good use during the match.
Cocu was satisfied, for example, with the way Stijn Schaars joined the match, when Jorrit Hendrix was injured and had to leave the field. "I can’t say it often enough: we just need everybody, even if not everybody is playing the same amount of games", is how the coach explained it.
Cocu is also pleased with the way in which PSV turned the match to its own advantage. That was the result of a tactic. The head trainer had observed, during his preparation for the game against NEC, that the Nijmegen team was vulnerable to early crosses.
"Balls that land precisely between the keeper and the central defenders", he explains. "We put a lot of practice into that during the training. So it’s great that we also manage to score in just such a situation." He is referring to the cross by Jetro Willems and the resulting header by Luuk de Jonge.
Source: Studio040
Translation: Lizzie Kean (LinkedIn)
