Barcelona coach Valverde: "We lost a game, that's all"
Barcelona coach Ernesto Valverde rued today's defeat at Levante: "Everything went wrong. The positive thing is that we always respond to blows like this".
Ernesto Valverde gave his assessment of this afternoon's 3-1 defeat to Levante at the Ciutat de València. The coach said he's naturally disappointed but Barça have to turn the page and move on.
What happened in the second half?
Everything just collapsed. We didn't start the second half well. We weren't creating any danger and although they weren't causing us too many problems, they put two goals past us in two minutes. The third really punished us.
Luis Suárez taken off injured on 40 minutes
Did Luis Suárez's injury affect your plans?
It's always a problem when you have to change a player in the first half. We're hoping it's nothing serious, but it's a setback. I don't know, we would have preferred Luis to have been on the pitch but now's not the moment to start thinking about that. Even when we were 0-1 up, I wanted to bring Busquets on to give us more strength in the centre of the park but they scored against us before I could do that.
Were you surprised by the performance of your players, are you thinking about resigning?
No to both of those questions. I'm not thinking about anything - only looking forward.
No regrets about omitting Dembélé
Was the decision to leave Dembélé out a technical one?
It was a decision which I took. He hasn't been playing and I decided to stick with the forwards who played the last games. If Dembélé is with us and we lose, I'll be asked about Ansu... It's always like that.
Have Barça's rivals lost the respect they had?
No. Our opponents play against us as if it's the biggest game of the year and so you need to be able to respond. We know what this result means and what it means to win at these grounds - the rival is always one notch above you. You need to make a massive effort but my team is used to that. They had a great second half and managed to beat us.