But Graham sir (national team coach Graham Roberts) visited us in the academy in the evening and consoled us stating that such things happen in football. [break]
He told us that he too had missed many spot-kicks in his playing career. Trying to console us he said that players learn from their mistakes and motivated us to work hard in future. My teammate Umesh Thapa and I had missed the spot-kicks in the match and it cost the team dearly.
But now we are ready to play on a bigger stage, the AFC U-16 group stage matches to begin from next week at the home ground. The whole team including me is ready for the tournament. I will try to put better performance and try to score many goals in the AFC tournament than the SAFF U-16 Championship.
Every department of the team including defense, midfield and forward has improved a great deal compared to SAFF. Now we are focusing more with ball. We have improved our fitness and we are doing well technically as well as tactically.
Every player of the team including sir (coaches) Sunil Shrestha and Mrigendra Mishra are working very hard. Roberts sir is also helping us. He focuses more on attacking and we are training in 3-5-2 formation which helps us to create more attacking chance.
Though opponents might be stronger than the teams we played during SAFF Championship, we have improved a lot now (after the SAFF). Had we been trained the way we are doing now, we could have done better in SAFF.
We hope we can qualify for the final stage. But the most important thing is to win the first match for building our confidence. We are taking on Lebanon during the first match on September 12 and Syria, Oman and Saudi Arabia on thed other days. The whole team is confident of making through to next stage.
We indulged in a brawl during the match against Bangladesh in the SAFF Championship. Though we had no intention of fighting with them they tried to hit us in our home ground ahead of home audience. They tried to provoke us.
We should not have fought with them but we failed to control our nerves as we were playing in front of such a big home crowd for the first time. But next day we realizes our mistakes and we promised never to commit such a mistake in the future.
Gurung is the captain of U-16 team.
(Based on conversation with Prajwal Oli)
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