Enyimba’s interim head coach Fatai Osho has defended his player Stanley Dimgba after his penalty miss cost them dearly in their Nigeria Professional Football League (NPFL) Match Day 15 clash with Heartland on Wednesday.
Dimgba saw his 26th minute penalty saved by Super Eagles goalkeeper Ikechukwu Ezenwa before Heartland scored two goals in the first half to win the game 2-0 at the Enyimba Stadium in Aba.
Team’s head coach Osho however told www.aclsports.com that such happens in the round leather game.
“When you lose a penalty, you’re a bad penalty taker but when you score it, you’re good in taking it. That’s just the summary,” said Osho.
“Dimgba has over time taken penalties for this club and scored. He lost it today but we can just excuse it. It happens. If Ronaldo and Messi of this world are missing penalties, who is Dimgba not to miss?
“We are not encouraging him to miss but if he had scored, we would have been praising him that within three to four days, he has scored four goals and him scoring it would have helped him and the team. Because he lost confidence and self belief,” Osho posited.
The former Remo Stars handler however admitted that the miss was a big turning point in the game after which his side derailed from what they wanted to do on the pitch.
He insists they must take the lessons learnt from the game into their next games.
“The penalty loss was a turning point. The moment we lost the penalty, anxiety set in and we started deviating from the way we played and I was telling them we need to play the way we trained. If you don’t play the way you train, you will run into troubles.
“They started going for the long balls believing it is how quickly you get the ball into the opponent’s area that leads to goal. That’s an erroneous impression. You need to plan and you go gradually for the kill.
“It’s a lesson and we have to learn from that. Especially when you want to play possession football, you must have that great belief that it will yield the result no matter what,” stated Osho.
The People’s Elephant will travel to Nnewi for their next league assignment against hosts FC Ifeanyiubah on Sunday.
