When speaking at his press conference, Patrick Vieira didn’t hide his disappointment with the way his side played, despite the victory at Nîmes (1-0).

Patrick, how do you analyse this match?
It was a complicated match for us. We suffered a lot. Walter (Benitez) keeps us in the match with the penalty save. On the whole, it’s a very average match for us. We will take the three points home but with the feeling that there is a lot more work to be done. It follows on from our previous matches. At the start of the the season, we played with a lot of style but lacked that luck. In the last couple of games, we have had the luck but have played averagely. We need to keep these results but also producing better performances.

Do you think that you would have won this match with 11 against 11?
Maybe the match would have been different? We may have had a click to wake us up, I don’t know. In the way the game played out, we were very average. The three points are good but the content isn’t enough, we weren’t sure of not conceding an equaliser in the last 15 minutes. Luck was on our side, I am happy about that.

At the break, you took off a midfielder to send on a forward…
The risk was reduced given the two red cards. But we needed to have more presence in the box. At the back, we are strong, we had a solid match. It’s true that with the possession that we had, we should create more chances. There is a lot to improve on in attack.

Even though your side kept a clean sheet for the third consecutive time in Ligue 1, they struggled a lot at the start of the game…
We knew that the first 20-25 minutes were going to be very tough given the atmosphere in the stadium. Unfortunately, we struggled to get into the game, we suffered, we made positional mistakes losing balls easily. We put ourselves in danger. It’s good not to concede but if we want to continue to progress and to win matches, we will need better performances. The results with matches like this one this evening, it doesn’t last long. We need to continue to work, there are lots of things to improve.

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