Chipolopolo coach Milutin ‘Micho’ Sredojević has stated that his team outplayed the African Champions Algeria and were unfortunate to only pick a draw after the two teams played out to a six goal thriller.
Micho told the ZamFoot Crew that his players gave their all to win the game but they could not outscore the Desert Foxes.
“I need to give credit to the boys, they wanted it for Zambia, I hope you saw from their body language, from their eyes that they wanted this,” Micho said.
“Our boys gave everything, unfortunately the best was not good enough on the day and we ran out of time, otherwise we could have won the game,” he added.
The Chipolopolo have continued to leak goals in games and have so far scored 6 and conceded 12 goals in the qualifiers and Micho picked that out as an area that needs to be improved on.
“We outplayed the Algerians but this was not enough as we failed to outscore them, we need to tighten the back and not concede,” the Serbian lamented.
Zambia came from 2 – 0 down to draw 3 – 3 with the Algerians in a thrilling match played at the National Heroes Stadium. Clatous Chama scored one goal while Austria based striker Patson Daka netted two penalties.
The result saw Zambia, who have only managed four points so far, bow out of the race to the Africa Cup of Nations finals as they cannot beat the 8 points amassed by second placed Zimbabwe even if they win the final game of the qualifiers to be played on Monday in Zimbabwe.
If conceding 3 goals and scoring 3 goals is what it means to outplay an opponent, then we have a wrong coach in Micho. I was expecting the coach to come clean and say what the nation saw: the defence was leaking; equally the midfield was initially non-existent until substitutions were made. However,to be fair the team played well towards the end of the first half and certainly in the second half. Micho should maintain this team but make few adjustments and work on the defence to prevent allowing goals like what happened last night and in the earlier exploits. Good luck boys. Beat the Zim Boys and console us.
He is not being honest