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Puel lauds 'fantastic' Lyon

Claude Puel believes Olympique Lyonnais fans saw a "great UEFA Champions League game" as they defeated FC Steaua Bucureşti 2-0 to end the hopes of the Romanian side and their new coach Dorinel Munteanu.

Juninho Pernambucano is congratulated by the Lyon bench
Juninho Pernambucano is congratulated by the Lyon bench ©Getty Images

Claude Puel, Lyon coach
Tonight we won, which is nice, but we also played good football. My players had a fantastic game. During the first half we tried to play the way we like to. All the Steaua players were defending and, on a difficult pitch, we tried hard to create space and prevent Steaua from attacking. After watching the first half, I said to myself it would be hard in the second, but we stayed united and well organised. Steaua have quality and showed it whenever we began to ease the pressure. We will play to win at Fiorentina and we will do the maths after that. Karim Benzema played well tonight, as all my players did. He has shown that he can be efficient in attack, but also that he can play for the team. We had to be strong. For me it was a great UEFA Champions League game.

Dorinel Munteanu, Steaua coach
I am disappointed with the way things have turned out. We wanted this game to be a new start for us in this competition; we were hoping we could get a good result. It was a game of two halves. In the first, both teams played well, until the free-kick. Without that we would have managed to reach half-time without conceding a goal. During the second half we put a lot of effort in trying to come back into the game. Because of the way we played, we allowed Lyon to attack. Olympique Lyonnais are a very good team, they have been the French champions for several years. When a team scores at the end of each half, you cannot say that it was tactics. We lost a game but we haven't lost hope in our future.