Pepe spoke to Spanish radio station La COPE this evening and came out in defence of coach Carlo Ancelotti.
Ancelotti-Mourinho: "Ancelotti will continue, there’s no doubt about that. He’s a great coach and in a short space of time has brought us a lot of happiness. I don’t miss Mourinho. It was a different era which is over. He’s not too lenient with us. He has a very distiguished curriculum and he demands a lot from us. Our training sessions under Ancelotti are much more intensive than they were under Mourinho. I thank God that I’ve had a coach like him – he’s really helped me a lot. He tells me: ‘Pepe, with your quality, you’ve got to anticipate play. You’re fast and strong and you read the game well. You need to be focused’”.
Hate towards Madrid: “Whenever we play at another ground in Spain, we can sense how much people hate us like they hated us when Mourinho was with us. Today, Madrid is a very big club; we’ve cleaned up our image. Now Isco gets an ovation when he goes off - that would have been unthinkable before”.
Casillas: “Casillas is the best goalkeeper in the world right now. It’s strange that someone like him gets whistled. Things were never clear when Mourinho was here; I paid the price for saying that he should be respected for what he has done for Spain. That was unfair. From one day to the next people forgot everything that Iker has won and everything he has given to football and that was quite painful for me to watch. When I came out and said that he deserves respect, it was taken as though I was his best friend and we were everyone else’s enemies. People got that completely wrong; Iker tolerated his situation as best as he could – he knows what it means to wear the Madrid shirt more than anyone of us and is always defending this club. Iker and a few others should really clear up what really happened”.
Cristiano’s party: “Cristiano, for me, will always be the best player in history. Every human being has the right to celebrate their birthday but it wasn’t the appropriate time. We have to celebrate but always respecting the club badge we represent”.
Crisis: “Getting whistled at the Bernabéu hurts, but our fans have every right to whistle us. They know when we have had a poor game and we have to recognize it as well. I don’t think we lacked attitude in the Schalke game. We ran a lot - but not as a team. We didn’t go into the game as focused as we needed to and we lacked intensity. We’ve lost freshness since coming back from our holidays; we need to be more focused and confront our games in the right way. Things will turn out better for us if we remain humble; by thinking that everything will turn out for us solely on our quality, we’re very mistaken. We need to work harder, attack, defend and suffer as a team. We’ll only win if we match our opponents for intensity. We have to confront every games as though it’s our last; we’ve hit rock bottom and now we have to react and get ourselves back up”.
