Exclusive club media interview with Ralf Rangnick ahead of Watford game 26 February 2022

Your substitutions have been really important in games, not just in the last week, but we’ve seen that throughout your time here at United. How big a part of management and coaching is that, the use of the bench and the way to change the game?
“Yes it’s obviously a big part. I would have loved to have five subs as well in the Premier League, but unfortunately this is not the case. I can still only hope, and I think it’s not only me but most of the other managers of the other clubs as well, that they change their mind at one stage and allow five substitutions. That was important for us in the Champions League game. It’s one of the jobs of managers, that they help their team to win games, and it’s important that we could change and regroup at half-time and in the second half by bringing on fresh players and all of them helped to improve our performance in the second half.

One of those was Nemanja Matic, who doesn’t often get the headlines. He came on and seem to calm things down in that midfield area, how important is he a part of the squad?
“Yes again, [he’s] very important, a very experience player, very positive in his approach. But also critical, he speaks up when he has got something to say. It’s not only that he calmed down the game, but we had more options in our build-up, we had our full-backs positioned higher from that very moment. He was more or less playing like a quarterback, and we could build up with himself and the two centre-backs. Our full-backs were positioned higher, we had more verticality, more speed, more movement with Anthony and Jesse [Lingard] later on and that’s why it was a completely different game from our perspective in the second half.”