Noussair Mazraoui is one of the 13 Manchester United players who will be representing their countries at this summer’s World Cup and will be facing teammate Mattheus Cunha next weekend when Morocco take on Brazil.
Speaking to the club’s media, Mazraoui has discussed his ambitions for his country in this tournament.
When you have time, we talk about the club, everything. This subject as well, especially [with] Cunha, because he’s probably going to play left or right winger, [if he’s] on my [side], then [it’s] 1v1, so it’s going to be fun.
I think we’ve been doing really good on an international level as well as in Africa itself. So yeh, expectations are much higher than they were four years ago because we’ve reached that and because we’ve done pretty well the last four or five years.
So yeh, the expectations are bigger and it’s up to us to handle that kind of pressure and to show again that you can do the same thing that you did four years ago, and it’s not just luck and it’s going to be like a constant level. I think that’s our biggest ambition for us.
Mazraoui was part of the Morocco side that reached the semi-finals at the last World Cup in Qatar that was played in December.
Yeh, it was a little bit different. I’m talking like I’ve done four World Cups, it was my first one! I think it’s different, of course, mid-season, it’s different in every aspect, physically, mentally as well. End of the season, you have the whole season [that you have played before it], just half-season [like Qatar was] is different. But what I remember from that World Cup is we just went in there with a good fight.
Everybody was free in their head. We knew we had a strong team. We knew we could do something, but we never expected to be in the semi-final. So that was a big surprise for us, I think for the whole world, and we enjoyed every minute of that.
