Galatasaray assistant coach Ismael Garcia Gomez has suggested the Turkish side will aim to take advantage of a “nervous” Manchester United team to try and force mistakes in their blockbuster Champions League tie on Wednesday. United have been hugely disappointing in the Champions League so far, losing three of their four group matches.
It’s left them bottom of their group heading into their penultimate match against Galatasaray, who sit one point above United. A win for the Turkish side will see them knock United out of the Champions League with Erik ten Hag up against it to stop that from happening.
Galatasaray won the reverse fixture 3-2 in a high-octane clash at Old Trafford in October with Mauro Icardi making United pay for some costly errors at the back. United looked threatening throughout the contest, but Galatasaray were equally impressive going forward.
And Gomez has admitted the Turkish side purposefully targeted United from the off to try and make the players “nervous”.
“We saw that Manchester United have good ideas, but they are struggling sometimes when they are facing a team with that high intensity in the pressing,” Garcia told ESPN. “In the games we saw, they had difficulties. Especially in the first half when things aren’t going well, we could tell even by video that the players were getting a bit nervous because it’s not simple. It’s what I saw at Old Trafford too.
“The stadium and the fans were fantastic, but you can feel in the environment that things are not going well and sometimes this can block the players. The players that they have are high quality, but when there is a block, it’s difficult.”
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Garcia has hinted they’ll look to follow a similar plan at home, where they have only lost twice in the whole of 2023. “The idea was to set a high tempo in the pressing and force mistakes,” he added.
“Not expect mistakes, but to force mistakes. That high pressing also made us concede situations and the first [United] goal is because of that. In Spain we say ‘the blanket cannot cover everything’ and if you want to force mistakes like we did with the penalty and the red card for Casemiro, also we might face the situation we had when United scored for 1-0.
“They have quality players. If the ball isn’t always covered in our pressing, they put the ball into the space, they have good runners and clinical finishers. We want to take the risk and we didn’t plan to go 1-0 down, but we planned to put United in difficulty when they had possession.”
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