Marco Rossi: the game of the year is ahead of us

Regeneration was the main focus on Sunday after Saturday's victory against Serbia, but on Monday, head coach Marco Rossi led a full training session on centre pitch at their Telki training base. The squad for this second match in four days is two players lighter, Zsolt Kalmár now suspended due to his red card, while Botond Balogh has linked up with the U21 national team.

The squad left for Kaunas early on the Monday afternoon and made they familiarised themselves with the pitch in the Dariaus ir Girėno Stadium which will host tomorrow's match. At the press conference held in the stadium, Attila Szalai admitted that although his situation with his club team has changed compared to his previous ones, mainly because he hasn't been given the opportunity to prove himself recently, nothing has changed in that he still tries to give his best in every match, and maybe his desire to prove himself is even stronger.

"Football is always about the present; it doesn't matter what happened yesterday, what the score was against Lithuania at home.. we can't think about that result anymore. Of course, lessons must be learned, but we must focus on the given task. Our goal is simply to achieve a good result away from home against Lithuania", Szalai added.

Marco Rossi then started his comments by saying that all the players are healthy and that regeneration will continue to be a big focus to ensure that every member of the squad is in the best possible condition for tomorrow's match.

"We played a match two days ago, so of course, it's still in the legs, but I'm sure that in such an important match, the members of the squad would play the game on one leg", Rossi explained. "We've come to get the three points, but let's not forget that our opponent will be a motivated Lithuania, who made things difficult for us for a long time in Budapest and, with its new national head coach, plays more aggressively and with more confidence than in the past. Two days ago, they won again after a long winless run, so they'll be very motivated, but we have to be even more motivated. We are facing the match of our year, because it could be a significant milestone in the history of Hungarian football if we were to qualify for the European Championship two games before the end of the qualifying campaign. I wasn't able to be on the bench for the decisive qualification match last time (against Iceland), so this would be the first time I'd experience qualification in the stadium, but I must emphasise this is only a theoretical possibility for the time being, as we have a match waiting for us and we have the utmost respect for Lithuania", Rossi said before answering a question about tomorrow's lineup by stating that: "if something's working well, there's no reason to change it, so it's better to finetune further what has worked so far".

The referee for Tuesday night's match will be Juxhin Xhaja from Albania. His assistants will be Dojando Myftari and Rejdi Avdo, while the fourth official will be Olsion Yzeiraj.