"The more you concentrate on easy teams the more they become difficult. We've got to prepare and study these teams and their characteristics," he told Sky Italia.
"Paraguay headed the South American classification for two years, dislodged recently by Brazil but a good team, evidently," he told reporters.
"We will try to understand them the best we can. We will do the same thing with Slovakia, which showed itself to be a very good team, overcoming important sides, eliminating important teams (in World Cup qualifying)."
"We will not consider the games easy or difficult, they are just games to win."
NEW ZEALAND COACH RICKI HERBERT
"We know Italy are a global power and the world champions so we are not going to make any bold statements that we are going to go out and beat them. But we said we want to go the World Cup and we want to play well and we want to go away with some good results," he told reporters.
"Most of the sides will be thinking they've got New Zealand in the group and see it as an opportunity to grab three points and move their aspirations forward, but we will be going there to make a statement and to make it as difficult as we can."
SLOVAKIA COACH VLADIMIR WEISS
"It is very hard to play against Italy, they have a lot of good players. It doesn't matter if they are 30 or 32 (years old), there is a lot of experience," he told reporters.
"Everybody wanted to get Slovakia or New Zealand. We are both in the group. Today the top power is Italian and everything is open."
PARAGUAY COACH GERARDO MARTINO
"It's a great experience for the younger players to face such great competitors," he told reporters.
