Interview

'Our spirit is better than three months ago'

Papa

We held on with 10 men to secure a hard-fought point against Crystal Palace on Saturday.

Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang had given us an early lead but after Jordan Ayew equalised with a fortunate deflection, our captain was shown red following a VAR review.

Palace mounted the pressure in the last 30 minutes but our defence stood firm to earn a draw, with Sokratis at the heart of the action.

Our Greek international spoke to the media after the game. This is what he had to say:

on whether a point is good enough with 10 men...

In the end, if you play with 10 men then yes. But if we watch the game back again we're disappointed because I think that we played much better than them. We had lots of chances to win the game.

our the build-up to our goal...

It's everything about the work we do in training. I think that the first 35 minutes had a lot of things that we've been working on. Everything there was positive.

on how disappointing it was to concede...

A little bit of it is us switching off and we were also unlucky because the ball came off David. I think that we fought afterwards and in the end we are not happy. We did much better than the other team but a point is a point. 

on losing a bit of control in the second half...

I think the first 35 minutes, we played very well. We did exactly what our manager asked of us. For 10 minutes in the first half and 10 minutes in the second half, we lost the game. I think we lost the mentality, the structure that we had. After the red card, it's difficult. 

on Aubameyang's red card...

VAR is there to help the referees. I didn't show a very good reaction, but we are disappointed this year because we have been a little bit unlucky with VAR. We've lost many points. It's not against VAR or referees, we're just unlucky. 

on what it says about our fighting spirit...

We had the chances and we were unlucky. I am very happy that we showed this spirit, especially after the red card. I think that this period has been better with what we're doing right now, that we're fighting all together, than how it was two or three months ago. We have to look forward, improve and play better of course, but with this spirit.

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