A very impressive Opening Ceremony and we had 2,500 people watching our game creating a fantastic atmosphere

The team started the game defending well with man to man restricted but we had problems in attacking due to our lack of team training. In the first half, two of the German goals came from mistakes whilst the other two came from penalties. We tried to improve our game during the first half correcting the positional play of the players in attack and I made a substitution to ensure that we had a man in the area for rebounds or even a far post finish from which we scored a goal pulling us back to 1-2. Then came the two penalties, of which the second was a poor decision as the foul was actually outside of the area. The Germans scored both to take a 4-1 half time lead.

We only had one training session with all the players and the team was constantly improving during the game. The team reacted well in the second half and we managed to score two goals pulling the game back to 3-4. We were now dominating the game and hit the bar and post missing good goal opportunities until we were undone by a mistake giving the German team their 5th goal. With the German’s again scoring from another penalty we finally lost the game 6-4.

As far I can see due to lack of training the group stage will help to create the automatism we need. In other words the group stages will now act as our training sessions where we will prepare and become more consistent for final phase.

Tonight we will play Portugal who beat yesterday Italy 4-1