Head coach of Enyimba Fatai Osho says conceding early in Aba to El Merrikh was majorly responsible for the People’s Elephants failure to overturn the first leg deficit against the Sudanese in the CAF Champions League.
Enyimba lost the first leg 3-0 in Omdurman and despite winning the second leg 2-1 at the Enyimba International Stadium, failed to make progress as they crashed out 4-2 on aggregate.
Osho has now revealed that Saifeldin ‘Terry’ Malik’s eighth minute goal in Aba basically put the tie to bed.
“It’s quite clear that the early goal really unsettled us,” Osho said. “Looking at the first leg, (Saifeldin) did a lot of work and we know his strengths and we worked a lot on how we could contain him.
“It’s quite disappointing. it’s not a good thing when you loose and start blaming the players, I don’t like to do that but I believe we could have done better.
“If we imagine that the goal never was, we had two goals and we would’ve been looking for one to stretch the game, it could have been much easier like that.
“Because of the number of goals we needed to get back into contention, we altered our style of play. There was no time, I wanted them to play the way we wanted to play but the fans won’t allow them to do that.
“They want to see every ball in their box but that’s not a guarantee you’ll get a goal. We were dropping too many balls in their box and it wasn’t hurting them the way I see it.
“It’s a bad one, we know that we can win and not qualify, we made this clear to them (the players) and it’s unfortunate we won and we’re out.”
He then added that failure to score in Omdurman affected his side’s chances of making further progress in the competition.
“The two goals we scored will answer that, we didn’t score in the first leg, we scored two here but unfortunately their goal weakened us. If you didn’t score in the first leg and then scored two in the second leg, there is a difference. It’s quite clear.”
Enyimba will now drop to the CAF Confederation Cup where they will attempt to reach the group stages by navigating a tricky playoff round.
The eight-time Nigerian champions will also be looking to make a big statement in this season’s Nigeria Professional Football League (NPFL) where they won their opening fixture 1-0 against neighbours, Abia Warriors.
However failure to progress to the Group stage of the CAF Champions League, a competition Enyimba has previously won twice will no doubt increase the pressure on Osho, a fact he knows too well.
“Every coach in the world is under pressure. Pressure is part of the game (because) if you’re not ready for pressure you can’t do this job”, he said.
“One thing is that the day you get a job as a coach, you should prepare to loose it the next day.
“Within that time you start, you keep working hard. You win the cup today, your team wants you to win the league, after the league, they want you to win the Champions League; that’s pressure and it’s familiar pressure we are used to as coaches.”
