Albert Roca wants to forget AFC Cup loss & focus positively on future

BENGALURU FC fought hard to earn a place in the AFC Cup finals as they held FC Istiklol to a 2-2 draw at the Kanteerava Stadium on Wednesday but lost on 2-3 aggregate.

At the post match press conference, captain Sunil Chhetri was asked what went wrong even after trying hard and getting too many chances, he said,

 "I really don't know, the boys and the team tried our best out there. And it was one of those days where what we wanted did not happen. We honestly tried our best with whatever we had."

Coach Albert Roca talking about the poor refereeing, said,

"I think there was too much that they had to go through. The actions taken by them are so important that and it can break anything in a game. Those decisions and the red card just put us in the back-foot and put us in a difficult decision. But these are certain things that we couldn't do much about it and it was out of our control."

Further talking about Khabra being red carded, coach said,

"I don't want to entirely blame him but it is a shame on our part. Things could have gotten worse and in matches like these one need to be cautious. It did become difficult for us to continue for the rest of the match with 10 men. The second yellow cost us a lot but it didn't cost the opponents much who committed similar action and it's unbelievable but these are things we have to live with and yes we had to pay for the actions."

Chhetri was asked about what was the half-time talk knowing that they had to play an entire half with 10 men, he said,

"It was really difficult, at half-time the talk was just to go out there and give our best. And once it began I saw Udanta was on the go, he was all over the place from one end to the other that pushed me to do the same. It was one of those games that we were just chasing anything at any time as much as we could. It was indeed a difficult task, not an easy task to play semi-finals against a team like Istiklol with 10 men."

Talking about the future for this team, coach said,

"What I see is that the team doesn't give up no matter what so I'm optimistic that it will only get better from here on for this team. In terms of football, we have a long road and we'll have few changes as the season begins. This tournament is over and less than a month to go for ISL, it's going to test our efforts in that and as much as we work hard, we can take the trophy from there. So what I want is for the team to just forget this tournament and focus on the future and be positive."  

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