“Then we said ‘we’ll play with Didi Hamann here, we’ll try to control the middle’ and when I finished my speech, Didi was going out to the pitch do his warm-up as I had decided to substitute Djimi Traore. Then Dave Galley said to me ‘Finnan will not be able to play the whole of the game. You will need to change him’.

“We had already used Smicer for Kewell. We were going to use Hamann, so if we needed to change Finnan inside 20 minutes, then it would be a big problem for us.

“So I said to Traore, who was going to the shower, ‘Djimi, change again. We’ll substitute Finnan’.

“That is the situation that changed in the dressing room. It was maybe after eight minutes of half-time. We needed to change one player and the position of some of the players, so that is what I was thinking about.

“Because Finnan had to go off, I needed to put Traore on the left side and Carra on the other side of the three at the back.

“We needed to protect the right side. That’s why I was thinking about bringing on Djibril Cisse and was working out where to put him. And then someone said ‘where is Luis Garcia?’ So we had to forget Cisse. We need to talk about Luis Garcia. And we need to put Smicer afterwards on the right side.”

“By 10 minutes, everything was under control. In one minute we needed to change and to change the plan. And in English, that’s a problem, so we must be really happy with the consequences.”