Frank Rijkaard
Frank Rijkaard
Franklin Edmundo Rijkaard; born 30 September 1962) is a Dutch football manager and former player. Rijkaard has played for Ajax, Real Zaragoza and Milan, and represented his national side 73 times, scoring 10 goals. In his coaching career, he has been at the helm of the Netherlands national team, Sparta Rotterdam, Barcelona, Galatasaray and the Saudi Arabia national team. Regarded as one of the best defensive midfielders in footballing history, and as one of the best players of his generation,...
ProfessionSoccer Player
Date of Birth30 September 1962
CityAmsterdam, Netherlands
He isn't in the squad because I wanted to give him a rest.
There's no point in conducting a witch-hunt. We just have to work on making sure this never happens again.
The moment will come and up until now the board have been thinking of other things. We have barely finished the holidays, we have had an assembly and also 'Ronnie's' contract. Apart from this the contract is only a piece of paper and I will work the same for Barcelona with or without it,
It is a shame that we couldn't win but, on the other hand, it doesn't change anything in respect to our chances of going through.
I saw some good things. Although we're not at our best, ... Little by little we're moving up to our peak.
We showed great pride to avoid defeat although I can't congratulate my players for drawing, ... It was only when we were losing 2-0 that some players lost their fear of wasting a pass.
We need to up the pace if we want to play effective and attractive football and break down well organised defences.
We had to suffer. It was important that we weren't beaten in defense.
We have fallen into the trap of playing too slowly this season,
We did our job and took the points and we're happy with that. This is just as important a win as any other even if the game wasn't particularly attractive. We ensured they had few chances and scored three times ourselves. They were happy to sit back and let us come at them and that meant the game wasn't too attractive, but we had to be on our guard against their counter attacks and we did that well.
We did our job very well and this win opens the door to the championship,
We did the job we had to do.
We are not looking at dealing with the height to stop them from developing their play but rather the formula.
We did everything we could to win on a tricky pitch. We created a lot of opportunities, we showed our talent, but between Bonano and the posts, we just couldn't find a goal.