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“We’re going to make it”
Rufete says “we’re looking for all the new signings to make an immediate impact” and that, as a player, Espanyol “taught me never to give up”
After the curtain came down on the winter transfer market, Rufete wanted to provide a brief review of goings-on at the club over the last few weeks, which produced four signings, and a couple of players, possibly including Piatti depending on what happens in the next few hours, leaving the ‘blanquiazules’.
The Sporting Director pointed out that “we’ve done the best we could in the club’s current situation. It will be a long and hard road. We knew that this week would be hard if we didn’t get the win, but it’s vital that we don’t give up. We have to stay levelheaded. It’s a marathon, not a sprint. As a player, this club taught me never to give up. The only thing I can promise the fans is that we will fight until the very end. I had the opportunity to play in a UEFA Cup final and also went through a situation like this. I’m not going to give up and neither is anyone at the club. We’re going to make it.”
He says that he didn’t see the right-back position as a problem area and that the club had been working to bring in a goalkeeper for a while “because this year we’ve had lots of problems with goalkeepers in our lower teams”. In any case, he says that all the recent signings were bought to make “an immediate impact” and that it means a lot that “all the new signings have said that signing for Espanyol is an important step in their careers. They are also important as financial assets for the club” and we kept that in mind when we signed them”. Moreover, he said “Right now we have the best players we could wish for and we have to support them” and said that he speaks to the first team players every day and has noticed that they put the team’s situation ahead of their personal lives”, even the players coming to the end of their contracts, “like Javi López said a few days ago”.
He insisted, “We’re convinced that the changes we’ve made are going to work well for us. Everything we’ve done we’ve done with professionalism and with the club’s situation in mind. We have had to adapt. In Summer there were lots of factors that made things difficult, there were lots of things to sort out”.
He says that he doesn’t regret the work done in the summer “because we were in quite a complicated position, but we tried to put together a squad that could compete on three fronts”. He also explained he saw “for myself at the stadium” the images of the three Espanyol players that “wanted to take the penalty against Granada. I saw three players that had the confidence to want to take it, and in our current situation, that can only be a good sign”.