To be fair to him, a couple of sentences later he said that any manager is free to do whatever they want to try and stop them, and it's up to them to overcome different challenges if they want to win. Obviously his line everyone's picked up on is that we didn't want to play.
Yeah I thought his comments overall were sound. It's true we didn't want to play BUT like you mentioned he recognised that the challenge is for his team to overcome that.
Plus he was complimentary towards Rafa so got no issues with what he said.