Glasner on Crawley, Riad, Kamada & the USA…
Following Palace’s 6-3 win over Crawley on Saturday, Oliver Glasner said he is looking forward to a productive week in the United States on the club’s pre-season tour.
The Eagles produced an exciting attacking display to go three goals to the good after just 11 minutes at Broadfield Stadium, with a quickfire exchange of goals in the second period resulting in an exciting match, shown live on Palace TV+.
Now, with further matches against Wolverhampton Wanderers (Thursday, 1st August, 01:00 BST UK time) in Maryland and West Ham United (Sunday, 4th August, 00:00 BST UK time) in Tampa to come this week – and tickets available here – Glasner gave his thoughts on pre-season so far, and the exciting challenges ahead…
“It’s important that many players got more minutes”
The first-half was really good. I'm a little bit disappointed – the second-half we lost the concentration, the focus, so we gave them three goals, and it's never good when you concede three goals.
Yeah, we scored nice goals, but it's important that many players get more minutes, especially now. Joa [Andersen] and Chris [Richards] coming back after their deserved vacation are just four days into training and they played 60 minutes both.
It’s challenging, but yeah, we will do the best out of it.
“The most important thing is all the players are fit”
First of all, the most important thing is that all the players are fit. I hope it's nothing serious with Cheick [Doucouré] today, but it looks not serious. All others could do every training session, every game.
With parts, I'm happy, especially today, how we created chances, how we've scored the goals. But also we have to be honest with four games in pre-season, we always conceded a goal.
That's what doesn't make me happy because we can't expect to always score two, three or four goals in every single game, so we have to be more consequent in our defending – and this will be the topic for the next weeks.
“He’s a great character”
[Chadi Riad] is a great character and you can see it in every game: very ambitious, very high quality and talent. He does really well.
He is a very good character and he’s also integrated pretty well, and the same with Daichi Kamada – I think everyone could see today what a fantastic football player he is.
Both are very important signings for us and both will get many minutes in the season, for sure.
“It’s important what he shows on the pitch”
It's not important if I know him [Kamada] well or not – it's important what he shows on the pitch.
That's what I could see today: working for the team in defence and always creating moments in offence with quick play, scoring goals, creating situations. That's what he's very intelligent in.
He’s a very intelligent player, so he can solve tight situations with one touch. And he's always there where we want to be.
But also, for him, it's always a competition with all the other players and, at the end, the best will play.
“We’ll use it as a training week”
We use it [the tour] as a regular training week. In the game on Wednesday, every player will get 45 minutes, and then we'll see at the end of the trip who is fit.
It will be a different temperature, more humidity and then, of course, travelling long.