Underlines His Full Confidence that The Boss’ Performance will Improve.. Pedro Emmanuel: We Played Fabulously but the Result Was Unfair

Press

Al Ain newly appointed head coach, Portuguese Pedro Emmanuel, stressed that his squad had a tough confrontation against an organized and good team given that he had a very short and tight schedule of training sessions conducted ahead of this game.

“During the past three days, we worked together and the I do believe that the team performed well on the pitch. They showed qualities of commitment, high team spirit and personally I am confident that the players will push themselves to the limit in the very near future.,” he said.

He added: “I believe that as a summary of the the course of match, we we succeeded in taking the lead by our first goal and it was possible to double the result. However, in the world of football, if you do not score you will be punished severely.”

“Everything changed in the game within 10 seconds. We retreated in the second half to close all spaces in our ground because we were playing against the wind while focusing on scoring the second goal. Practically wise, we did not lose the match, but we lost playing the finales.”

In response to a question on the reason for the having similar scenario when playing against Al Nasr in the league, he said: “I have full confidence in my team’s ability to play better in the upcoming games. Indeed, we had the chance to score our second goal, as I stated earlier, but we failed to do so. As you know to take the lead by two goals is different from scoring one goal.”

As for the reason behind selecting Jamal Marouf to take the first penalty kick instead of Lapa Kodjo, he said: “I decided to give Jamal the first kick after yesterday’s training session and he did well in the penalty kicks training.

He signed off by saying that he does not believe that the penalty shootouts are related to absolute luck. “The team did well, and the result was unfair. I promise our performance will be better in the upcoming matches.”