Despite being annoyed by the goal conceded, OM's coach could not hide his satisfaction after the team refound winning form at the Vélodrome. With the scre at 2-1, he believes that qualification depends mostly on his men next week in Amsterdam.

You said before the match that you wanted your side to take risks, win and not concede any goals. Are you satisfied with two out of three?
First of all, we won at the Vélodrome and that is important. It makes us very happy.
Especially as I think that nobody can say we didn’t deserve to win. I do, however, have two regrets: the goal that we conceded and the fact that we weren’t able to score any more ourselves.

Do you regret not having taken advantage of being a man up …
Van Basten made the right decision when their player was sent off. He could have moved to a 4-4-1, but he preferred leaving space on the right as he saw that we were not going to make the difference down that wing. Well done him. Despite everything, we had chances for Mamadou (Niang), and Bonnart which could have given us 3 or 4 more goals.

What did you think of Ajax?
We were doing well up until 2-0. Afterwards there were a few moments when we lacked a certain amount of concentration and we lost the ball, I couldn’t see us conceding though. Ajax showed glimpses of what they were able to do when we let them. We saw the match against Fiorentina, they played in exactly the same manner, except that we closed them down very high up the field. We got into the match very quickly and it is thanks to that that we were able to score two great goals, before unfortunately conceding the penalty.

The cost of the victory was dear, with the exits of Cana, Koné and Bonnart…
Yes, very dear. I hope it won’t be too serious for Koné (blow to the leg) and that we will have him back for the match against Paris. We’ll also have to see how things go for Lorik (knee). As far as Bonnart is concerned, it looks like it is pretty serious and he could be out until the end of the season (he is suffering with a groin problem and will be out at least two months, we learnt later on in the evening, ed.)

Is this result sufficient going into the second leg?
If we play well, we will have nothing to fear. On the other hand, if we put in an average performance there is a chance that we could be eliminated. It doesn’t necessarily depend on Ajax, but more so on us.
A perfect result would have been 2-0. 2-1, is a little annoying. But, we have to consider that a victory opens up other perspectives to us. It is not like we are going there a goal down. We have a chance of going through, we won at the Vélodrome, there were moments when we proved that things are coming back and I hope we won’t have any bad news tomorrow.