Rafa's master plan for world domination

"We have been doing a special plan for the past week to try and win back time," he said. "That involved changing the habits of the players, in terms of when they eat and when they sleep.

"We wanted to acclimatise them to the time difference before we travelled, so we had to do this.

"Our training sessions have been held about an hour earlier than usual since last week.

"We also told the players to try not to sleep too much after the Middlesbrough game and do so on the flight to Japan.

"In normal circumstances, you need a week to acclimatise to such a big time difference. We had to start in England because we have a match three days after our arrival."