Bangladesh coach Lodewijk de Kruif refused to give up hope for a semi-final berth despite his charges were completely outplayed by their Nepalese counterparts on Saturday.
Kruif blamed his defence for the debacle in the opening match as they failed to put up any resistance before two Nepalese forwards Anil Gurung and Bharat Khawash scored one apiece in the first half to give the home side a perfect start to their campaign.
`You cannot win games nowhere in the world if you don’t sort out your defence,’ Kruif said at his post-match news conference. ‘If you go behind 2-0 in a stage like this, in this stadium, in this crowd, you know you can’t win the game.’
`I think we could see two teams with different intentions of playing football. What we wanted to do is play football all over, play with one touch, keeping possession. The intention was to do it with high tempo and create chances from the side, but we could not,’ said the Dutchman.
Kruif was disappointed with the result despite a good preparation which was hardly reflected on the field.
`Everybody knows when you work very hard and you put in a lot of energy and a lot of power and a lot ideas, you train in every area on the pitch…everything that is asked in modern football, then you start with a result like this, it is very disappointing,’ he said.
Kruif observed that his team did not take any risks to reduce the margin in the last few minutes.
`When you are ahead at the last 10 minutes, you have to try something as a team. You take more risks. From there Nepal created a few chances. The total picture of the game is that Bangladesh gave it away in the first 25 minutes of the game.’
Kruif, however, is still hopeful of making the semi-final.
`We are playing to win. We are very motivated and eager,’ he said.
‘I just hope it was only a bad day for us, a bad 30 minutes. Tomorrow we will evaluate the game and continue. It is not my style to blame players anyhow. I want to motivate them. Tomorrow we will talk about the match, forget it and prepare for the next,’ he said.