I’m not fully satisfied, says Bruzon

“This goal is not mine, it is for all my teammates,” central defender Tapu Barman said after striking the decisive goal against Sri Lanka to give Bangladesh a winning start in the SAFF Championship in Male yesterday.

Netting the only goal of the game also saw Tapu join Mahbubur Rahman Sufil on five goals for the national team.

“I’m happy to have scored the winner because I always try to help my team. We played really well today. I always listen to my coach and take four to five penalty shots every day during practice,” Tapu said, opining his best goal was the one that helped Bangladesh play out a draw against Afghanistan in the World Cup Qualifiers.

However, while Tapu may have found a reason to be satisfied, coach Oscar Bruzon was not overjoyed by the team’s performance.

“We were favourites according to the FIFA ranking. I think it was good for our side to play against Sri Lanka in the opening match because we set a tone of improvement,” the Spaniard said at the post-match conference. “We could not be satisfied even with the playing style, only with our control of the game. I repeat I am not fully satisfied with the performance. But we need to be aware that we should convert half our chances by improving our conversation rate,” the 44-year-old added.

Bruzon believes the result could have been different had the forwards converted the opportunities they created in the second half of the game.

“My only worry is that we need to improve finishing, which is a long-standing problem. I think we created five to six scoring chances in the second half but could not finish. We are going to work on it in the coming days,” Bruzon said. “Bangladesh can play very good football and Bangladesh can control the game. I think we formed excellent combination, short and long. If we had a better conversion rate, results could have been better today.”

“I think we knew that we should have full control of the game and we wanted to command the central areas in the opposing half. Sri Lanka defended deep in the first half and we went very close to their defence though we struggled to control some areas.

“We created good openings from the left flank and, in the second half, we decided to change the formation to a 4-4-2 from a 4-1-4-1 to keep the backline solid. Saad Uddin replacing Jewel Rana also clicked well for us,” added Oscar.