Mario Hsllop, the head coach of the Al-Ain team from Argentina, noted that playing against a team with such a large number of fans is not easy. He emphasized that playing in this atmosphere is much more complex, indicating that Egyptian Al-Ahly took the initiative with a mistake that led to a goal in the first half. Al-Ahly held a victory over the Emirati Al-Ain with a score of 3:0 in a match at the Cairo stadium in the quarterfinals of the Intercontinental Club Cup. The Emirati team left the continental tournament after losing to Al-Ahly, not doubting their ability to reach the third round after a win over Oakland City 6:2 in the qualifications.
During the press conference after the match, coach Hsllop stated: "This is football, sometimes you may have a representation of the match and consider it a good selection, but today we did not play at the highest level. This is a good lesson for us, we need to take our mistakes into account and learn from them." He continued: "Playing against such fans is hard, but the main thing is that we respect the tournament. At the level of football, Al-Ahly played better than us. We made many individual mistakes, for which we paid dearly. When you play at a high level, it is hard to allow mistakes. In such an atmosphere, you need to present the ideal match, but we did not achieve that."
The Argentine coach added: "We tried to play with Sofiane Raghimi as an attacker, but after our failure, we tried to add Labu Kojdo to him, but all the decisions we tried did not yield results. They managed better. We tried to show our best football, but at some moments of the match, we did not feel comfortable. We missed goals due to individual mistakes that should not happen in such matches." Concluding his remarks, the coach said: "We played against a strong team in front of their fans. Sometimes all this effort and energy is not enough. I don’t want to say that we did something miraculous, winning the Asian Champions League, but I want to say that we want to return here again."
