By Omolagba Oluwayemi
Football Writer, kick442.com-Nigeria
Having finished top of group A with 7 points after a win over Zimbabwe yesterday, head coach of Mali CHAN team, Nouhoum Diane said he wants his team to go as far as possible in the tournament.
Why speaking to newsmen after the game yesterday, he made known that the team didn’t make adequate preparation but are getting better game after game.
“We came to this tournament with 23 players, 10 of them hay ten training sessions, the rest of them, 13 players had only five training sessions. With five training sessions, it’s difficult to compete in such a competition as this, he said.
We didn’t play any International tournament in 2020 due to the coronavirus issue, our last official football was on 17th of November, 2019 and this is January 2021. In my own opinion as a coach, without playing football for more than a year we can’t have good performance but we’ve shown more than enough for the preparation we had.”
He also talked about his style of play which he thinks has really helped them thus far in the tournament;
“Sometimes it’s not necessary to play a good game but to get a beautiful result because at the end no one will ask you how nice did you play but what is the result. It’s not easy to go in such a short time to play beautiful football game after game.
“Secondly I can’t judge myself but you can judge me and also I chose players based on their performance in 2019 because, the time was really short and all the circumstances surrounding are just too difficult but if you think I did a good job, thank you very much, we still have a whole lot of space to improve but I want the team to go as far as we can.
“We give the players a good charge, we observe teams that play good football with and without the ball, we explore their weaknesses we try to use counter attacks and also we try to be compact from defense. This he said when asked to rate himself and his team’s performances against a top side.”
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