Adino Mustedanagic: "Very valuable lesson and we move on next challenges"

Sabah’s U-19 team played their first match in the second round of the UEFA Youth League. Our team suffered a 0-5 defeat away against France’s Nantes. Adino Mustedanagić, the head coach of our U-19 team, shared his thoughts on the match:

"We started from 2nd round of Youth League Country winners Playoff. We played Nantes, the representative of France. Nantes is a big traditional club whose first team dont perform well for some time, but their academy is well recogosed as one of the best. Whole city of Nantes was very excited and motivated for this game which we experienced in city and stadium was full.

To do well in this kind of games - some things have to fall into place. You need to do maximum performance - psychologically and tactically on team and individual level, and provoke little bit luck.

Unfortunatelly, already in 3rd minute we conceded from individual mistake. It followed with 3 more goals from unforced individual mistakes.

As result suggest that it was really bad. But first 2 goals came from corners and next 2 from unforced errors. Only 5th goal was from open play. Our problem was that we couldnt make pressure on opponent and we didnt do well with the ball, specially in transition moments. Physicallity of french players forced us to maintain numerical advantage near them which resulted in low block.

We prepared for match maximumly. Even our 1st team helped us with friendly game last week, which gave us more insight for this game. But its hard to replicate pitch and weather conditions we encountered.

Players did execute our gameplan in maximum they could. We now have to learn as much as we can from this game. While french players have hundreds game like this and improve from each one, for some of our players this was first experience like this. Very valuable lesson and we move on next challenges".


It should be noted that the return leg between Sabah and Nantes will be held on November 5 at the Bank Respublika Arena.