Head Coach Marco Pezzaiuoli Gave Us His Thoughts Following The Blues’ First Defeat Of The Campaign…

On the game and the errors that cost Bengaluru FC the points…

It’s not my thing to talk about other teams. I can talk about us, and as you saw, we made a mistake in the first five minutes. It was a big mistake that cost us a goal, and for their second goal as well, it was a mistake by Udanta.

But I choose not to assess the bad things too much, I will look through the positives because we’re also scoring goals. Against Odisha, we had a chance to score two or three goals and I think we dominated 80% of the game. It’s easy to play defensively and Odisha FC did that. After they scored the first goal, the game got more difficult but you can see how much spirit the team has.

They came back to draw level and showed that they wanted to win the game. I saw that through the 90 minutes. But as I said before, when you make a mistake, it’s important to be better than the opponent for the rest of the game, and try to score more goals.

On the penalty incident…

When players from both teams go into the box before the penalty is taken, 99% of the time the penalty is retaken. I’m not sure why that didn’t happen last night in India, and you’ll need to ask the referee because the decision went against us. This happens a lot around the world, but I’m not sure why the decision was different for us.

Sunil Chhetri is one of the best when it comes to penalties and freekicks, but sometimes even players like him can miss. But, more needs to be asked about the referee in this incident. It is unfortunate that the outcome of a game is decided in this way.

On the decision to hand Naorem Roshan Singh a start…

Roshan has been training well in our pre-season and I think he deserved to play this match. He’s a young player and part of the future here at Bengaluru FC, and he needs to get this kind of experience. As I had mentioned at the beginning of this season, what we are doing here is a step by step process, where we’d like to bring in more young players through to the first team.

On starting Prince Ibara ahead of Cleiton Silva, and squad rotation…

I think Cleiton is a very creative player, he played well in the last game and so did Prince. But, sometimes you have to make a decision and play only one striker. We have 20 games in this season and we play almost every three days. So, the players need to have enough energy to match the style of the team. We’re a side that likes to press high and not stay in our own half. We try to constantly attack and so we need fresh players for the first 60 minutes and then we can bring players on like how we gave Cleiton his minutes today.

I think Cleiton did very well in the second half of the game, but again, it’s not only about creativity. I don’t think there was a lot of space in the first half because we made the first mistake.