In his second season at Barcelona, Thomas Vermaelen has finally inserted himself in Luis Enrique's rotation. After a never-ending battle with injuries, the Belgian defender got healthy, worked hard and earned his minutes. He is not a regular starter or an integral part of the team, but he's still viable and important to the Blaugrana.
But it wasn't easy for the center-back. After five seasons with Arsenal, Vermaelen came to a new city, language and culture. Even more important and difficult, he joined a team with a completely different style of play and training, and it was a difficult transition. In a good, lengthy interview with The Telegraph, Vermaelen spoke about the famous Rondos, his time with the Catalans, facing Arsenal again, and more.
Here's a look at a few quotes from Thomas:
“The first thing I noticed here was the intensity of the pressing. The pressure is on straight away when we lose the ball. We do a lot of positioning games, focusing on getting the ball back. The pressure the players put on you is incredible, you have no time on the ball.”
“We always do it at the start of training, it doesn't only warm you up but it’s a training session in itself, you try to keep the ball in possession and make the guys in the middle do the pressing. We did it sometimes at Arsenal but not a lot of clubs do it like we do it here. It’s a tradition. Even if we have a game in the evening, we come here in the morning and do a rondo.”
“Of course I don't play every game, I’m not Messi. It’s not easy to play here, there is a lot of competition, we have a lot of great players, especially at centre-back, but you can't expect it to be easy if you play for a club like this. It’s a challenge but I’m very happy to be here, to train with the best, to get better with the best and try to get as many games as I can.”
“Yeah but what can you do, give up the opportunity to play for Barcelona? I knew when I came here it wouldn’t be easy, I knew it was going to be a challenge. It meant moving, another culture, another language, so you always have to adapt. But sometimes you have to go for it. If you're playing against Messi or Neymar or Suárez in training you learn a lot - you can only improve.”
“I watch a lot of Arsenal games because I have warm memories of the club, and because they are a very attractive team. I watched the Leicester game last week, it was very stressful but these are the most beautiful games to win. Now the title race is wide open, if they hadn’t won it would have been more difficult but now it’s on. I always said at the start that Arsenal had a big chance to win it. Unfortunately we had to go our separate ways but luckily I signed for a beautiful club like Barcelona.”
“I’ll try to play for Barcelona as long as I can. In football you can never look too far ahead, anything can happen. I’m 30 years old, I have the experience to know that you can’t plan the future, unfortunately.”
Source: Telegraph
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