Meet Caio Henrique

"Like a striker who has more trouble falling asleep when he doesn't score, do you sometimes dwell on not providing an assist for several matches?"

Absolutely, when that happens, it starts to weigh on me and I get forward more. Obviously, you have to know how far you can go. But if I'm on four games without an assist, of course I'm going to try to go more on the attack to give myself more chances to make some.

"Do you consider providing the last pass to be something special?"
It could be. For me, it's a question of one's individual qualities. When I was young, I started playing as a midfielder, as a 10 or 8, so I always had that ability. When I was moved to full-back, it helped me a lot. I can say that I'm a midfielder who plays full-back. I'm a mix of the two. When you've played full-back your whole life, you can have more trouble interpreting matches, seeing spaces. The midfield position gives you the idea of space, of movements. It allows you to better understand the time it will take for the ball to reach an attacker who is running. These are things that I have a feeling for. When I have the ball and I see movement, I have the impression that I can visualize very quickly what needs to be done and that I see this more quickly than others.

"So you don't regret not having been trained as a full-back?"
Not at all. The quality I have with the ball at my feet, I have it because I was a midfielder. Because in midfield, you have less space to control the ball, you have to look for the quick pass or the long pass. If then you start playing as a full-back, with this quality and the fact that you have more space around you, it becomes easier. It's easier to learn the defensive part than the offensive part. The offensive part is the freedom you have with the ball at your feet: either you know how to do it, or you don't know how to do it. You're not going to learn these skills, it's something natural.

"And the defensive part of things?"
That's something else. You have to visualize, get to the opponent quickly, press him, be well positioned, have good posture. These are things you can work on. Of course I still have to improve on many defensive aspects: I have to be tougher in duels, better in the air. But if I take the videos of my first season at Monaco and those of me today, I see a very big evolution. When an attacker takes the ball, I manage to narrow the spaces better and tighten things up.

"Your first experience in Europe was at Atlético de Madrid (from 2016). Is Diego Simeone the best coach to improve a player defensively?"
There is no doubt about it. The specific training sessions he does for you, I have never seen them again. For example, exercises where he puts a weight on the end of an elastic band that is around you, there is a small goal and a guy with the ball. You have to run with the weights, then take them off, and throw yourself to prevent the opponent from scoring. These are things that you can do in preparation, but he made you do them every day, all season! We also did a lot of 3 against 2, with only two defenders. He liked to repeat: "You have to know how to defend when you are short-handed!"

"Marc Cucurella was voted best left-back of the last Euro. Did you agree with this choice?"
For me too, he was the best. To be honest, he surprised me a lot. When the tournament started, nobody talked about him. He's basically a winger. But if you look back at the games he played, defensively, he was a rock. On his side, opponents couldn't do anything. And offensively, he did things well. You didn't think: "Wow, that's extraordinary", but he did what he had to do. That's what we're here for, the full-backs: if we can't provide an assist but we're very solid in defensive tasks, that's fine with us. We have to accept our role. If you can't help offensively, OK, help defensively.

"When you watch Monaco's matches since Adi Hütter has been here, you think that the main idea is to score first, before not conceding a goal..."
But on the pitch - especially for big matches - you already know after 15 or 20 minutes what the match is going to look like, whether we're going to have more or less space. If you know that you're not going to have a lot of space in defense, you focus more on defensive tasks. You have to imagine all that. The coach can tell you: "We're going to start by attacking on your side." The match starts and you see that the opposing coach has planned two players on you to close off the spaces. What do you do? You have to play on the other side. “Caio, forget about your runs and focus on the defensive aspect.”

"Does your position on the pitch, next to the bench every other half, make you a privileged relay for your coach?"

 When he has to pass on information, he almost always goes through me so that I can pass it on. And that helps me a lot! Since we're in the game, we don't see all the spaces on the pitch. But we have assistants who see that in the stands. They pass it on to the coach who then tells me: 'Caio, there are spaces in the middle of the pitch, warn the team that we have to go through there'. That's how it works. There are a lot of details that you don't realize from the outside."

Read more:

Match Recap: AS Monaco 1-1 RC Lens