00:00How ready is Alexander Isak to play for you and make his debut against Burnley?
00:04He's obviously got his first minutes playing for Sweden against Kosovo,
00:08but I'm also going to ask you what you make of the criticism he's received
00:11over the way things ended at Newcastle and what kind of impact that has had on him, if anything at all.
00:18First of all, I think the Swedish manager, Jondal Thomasson, deserves a big compliment,
00:26because he gets one of the best, maybe the best strikers in the world,
00:32and needs to play two very important games for his country,
00:35but understands that if he would play him twice 90 minutes
00:38then probably the player would have been injured for multiple weeks.
00:42And that's not always easy for a manager, that he takes care of the interests of a player,
00:48so he deserves a big compliment for that, and we will treat Alex the same as they did,
00:54so don't expect him to be every single game 90 minutes on the pitch,
00:59that's definitely not going to happen in the upcoming weeks.
01:01He missed a proper pre-season, I think he missed three or four months of team sessions,
01:09and so now we have to build him up gradually, with us playing so many games,
01:14hardly any training time.
01:15So that's going to be a challenge, but we've signed him not only for the upcoming two weeks,
01:19but we've signed him for six years, so yeah, this is what we have to keep in mind,
01:25and what the fans have to keep in mind if they see that I take him off at a certain moment,
01:30or I only bring him in for a small amount of minutes,
01:33that's all for the long-term fitness of the player.
01:36And the criticism?
01:37In football there's always criticism, so sometimes people cheer for you,
01:44so I think after he won the League Cup everyone was really happy with him,
01:49and in other moments you get criticised,
01:52this is part of his life, my life, our jobs,
01:56and now he's a player from us, and I'm really happy with that.
02:01Thank you very much.
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