Levante coach, José Luis Mendilibar: 'this Barcelona reminds me of Guardiola'

Posted Saturday, September 20, 2014 by YAHOO Sport

Barcelona's next challenge in their quest for La Liga title is in Valencia, against Levante, on Sunday. Levante's coach, José Luis Mendilibar, gave a press conference on Friday to preview the match, and he expressed his respect for the opponent, and gave Barça coach Luis Enrique a lot of praise for his job. But he doesn't plan on letting the Blaugrana beat them.

Here's a few highlights of his answers:

"Barcelona have been more agressive, which reminds me of Guardiola's team. The biggest thing to me is their ability to recover the ball as close to the attacking box as possible. We have to worry about that high pressing and do our best not to give them many chances close to the goal.

If you watch all of their matches, you know that your best strategy is to defend. We know that the normal thing is for them to have the ball and play on our pitch. We need to be comfortable with that, and we also need to feel like we're not on constant danger all the time.

We haven't done a good job so far, so this match against the leaders is an opportunity for us to gain some momentum. I'm convinced that we're going to make the game difficult for them, and a good performance on Sunday can improve not only our position but our spirits. We can get more optimistic.

We want to win. And I can promise we're going to do our best to win. It's going to be a great match."