Picture this. You’re Mircea Lucescu, lead coach of defending Ukranian champions Shakhtar Donetsk. Your team has strolled through the Champions League group stages (apart from a 5-1 away loss to Arsenal), blown up AS Roma by an aggregate score of 6-2, and your reward is facing Barcelona in the quarter-finals. You can either get massively worried about the opposition your side is going to have massive trouble beating, or you can recognise that your team doesn’t have much of a chance and live with it. Lucescu has chosen option number two:
FC Barcelona Vs. Shakthar Donetsk, 2011 UEFA Champions League: Mircea Lucescu Plays Down Shakhtar Chances
We have played against them lots of times. We know how Barcelona play. The players and I have a lot of respect for Guardiola – he’s one of the most promising coaches in the world, very intelligent. Their players have been together for a long time, they are very fast, technically excellent and we have to counter that.
We have to bear in mind we have two matches. Every other team has lost to them so we just want to play well and ensure we are still in with a chance for the return. Shakhtar have developed more than anyone in recent years and it’s an important moment for us to reach the quarter-finals; winning consistently rather than getting one or two results.
Spoken like a man who has absolutely no faith he’s going to get a good result in the Camp Nou. Which is good, because any Shakhtar coach who actually expected his team to progress would probably be diagnosed as clinically insane. That said, Lucescu’s doing a great job here of deflecting all of the attention onto Barcelona and away from his own side - there is absolutely no pressure on Shakhtar to go out there and do anything but try their best, while the hosts will have the weight of the world on their shoulders until the put the game away.
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