Scaloni, annoyed by press leaks, clarified that De Paul is fine and won’t rule him out against the Netherlands

The coach of Argentina national team, Lionel Scaloniheld a press conference before the match against Holland for the quarterfinals of Qatar World Cup 2022. The central theme of the meeting with journalists was the physical condition of Rodrigo De Paulwho according to reports in the last few hours would have suffered from muscle pain and was in doubt for this Friday’s duel at 16:00 (Argentina time).

“Yesterday’s training was behind closed doors”, began Scaloni, surprised by the journalistic versions released on Wednesday afternoon. And then he added: “Rodrigo is fine in principle. We’ll see in training to define the formation, I don’t know where this information comes from.”

“Today we have one last training session and we will see how everyone is. After a match there are always players who train separately, and today we will make the decision taking into account how we want to approach the match,” said Scaloni, who commented that Di María would be also available for the match against the Dutch.

“We’re used to opponents always lifting something different, within matches there are variations and tactical modifications. I don’t want to get ahead of myself, we’ll see it tomorrow, we have to wait.” sign that Messi can receive.

After a conference in which he spoke on several topics, including the memory of Alejandro Sabella, two years after his death, the DT spoke to a group of correspondents who were waiting for him outside the conference room.

“Why do they ask me about De Paul? If you tell me who told you about Rodrigo, I’ll tell you how he is. Training was behind closed doors. I don’t know if we played against Argentina or the Netherlands. I don’t we like things to be known, they are things we have to learn and improve. We will train today, Rodrigo arrives with a load of games like most and we will evaluate him. Whoever takes the field must do so in the best conditions”, underlined Scaloni.

And then he expanded, when asked by a colleague: “I’m not angry. If there’s a player who doesn’t train, I don’t know what the urgency is to go out and tell why he doesn’t train. We create alarms. You want him to win the Argentina? The task of journalists is not to write to see what happened. Training was behind closed doors, full stop,” replied Scaloni, annoyed by the press leaks.

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