Barcelona boss Luis Enrique admitted Valencia “deserved more” at Camp Nou on Saturday but maintained his side were full value for their 2-0 win.
Goals from Luis Suarez and Lionel Messi either side of the 90 minutes earned La Blaugrana a hard-fought three points at Camp Nou, but the Coach believes his side could have paid for their drop in performance levels on another day.
“It’s a great result. I have to congratulate the players because they really gave it their all,” he said after the game.
“The players were drained [from the Champions League last Wednesday], but they still gave a complete performance. Now we’ll make sure we’re ready for Tuesday.
“It was a different game to any we’d played at Camp Nou previously. We had a wonderful start but struggled to deal with [Valencia’s] pressure.
“We began to make mistakes. [Valencia] had many chances and probably deserved more.
“However, victory is only decided by what you’ve done in the 90 minutes, and one of the conditions in the world of football is to be clinical [in front of goal].
“In the second half, we were more comfortable. At first, we made an uncharacteristic number of individual errors, but we raised our performance levels and started to control the game.
“It’s important that we regained control as quickly as we did because normally it’s near-impossible to recover so quickly.
“There are six games left and many points up for grabs, and it’ll be very difficult, but we had to do our homework today and we did it.
“[Having good goalkeepers] is easy when you have a sporting director like [Andoni] Zubizarreta making the signings.”
