Valverde: "I love my team's spirit"

Ernesto Valverde praised his squad's upbeat attitude whilst stressing his belief that they're luck in front of goal will change soon, saying it's just "a matter of time and persistence".

The Lions return to LaLiga action on Saturday evening, travelling to Levante UD after registering a hard-fought 0-0 away draw against Slavia Praha in the Champions League on Wednesday night.

"I love how my team plays, how they approach every match and their spirit," the gaffer said at his pre-match press conference on Friday.

"It's true that sometimes we're encountering difficulties of one kind and other times of another. We're not scoring as often as we did last year.

"It's a matter of time and persistence. We have players who can take chances and score goals. When you're creating chances and not taking them, you're missing something. But when you're not creating chances, you're missing a lot more.

"We need to keep creating chances and we need to be more precise. There are things we want to change in order to improve, and many other things that make us strong and that we want to maintain.

"We don't need to make any radical changes at all. I think the team is doing well overall, and our idea is to take advantage of every opportunity."

Saturday's clash in Valencia is the first in a series of three tough fixtures in the space of seven days which also sees the Lions host Real Madrid and Atletico Madrid in Bilbao.

Valverde said: "We're coming off the back of a strong performance in which we deserved more. We were unable to win in Prague but now we have to focus on LaLiga with three tough back-to-back matches.

"We want to get off to a good start. Obviously, this first match is important because we lost our last LaLiga game and we need to pick up points. We've dropped points at certain stages of the championship and now we have to make up for them."

As for Levante, Valverde is expecting a "well-organised team" that can "defend well".

He continued: "They're achieving better results away than at home, where they have had some tough matches.

"They're difficult to beat, like all of Julián Calero's teams. There's not a lot separating us and we all need points. Unless something unusual happens, matches aren't usually decided by a large margin of goals."