Mumbai City FC suffered a 2-0 defeat at the hands of Hero Indian Super League (ISL) debutants Bengaluru FC in their opening fixture of the season at the Sree Kanteerava Stadium in Bengaluru on Sunday. The away team put up a good defensive display before eventually succumbing to strikes from Eduardo Garcia and Sunil Chhetri. Lucian Goian in his second season with the Islanders, led his side out in their season opener. The Romanian spoke to indiansuperleague.com after the match and shared his insights on the match. Here are excerpts from the interview.

A disappointing start to the campaign, what are your thoughts on the match?

Well, we lost, so it’s not easy. But this is football. We have to learn from the game that we played tonight. We need good rest now and from tomorrow we have to start preparing for the next game. It’s too bad we could not get a positive result because it was important for our confidence. But we have to take the positives and learn from the mistakes that we made today and keep going.

What were your plans going into this fixture?

We cannot talk about plans right now. The season has just started, so it is too early to talk about plans. We have many more games to play. So, we are going to take it game by game and see what is going to happen. It is important to recover fast after this match and think about the rest of the games.

How was it playing against Sunil Chhetri, who is a former player of your club?

Playing against Sunil Chhetri is like playing against any other player. It is not something special for me. I don’t have any special treatment for any player. I just play the same against everybody.

Any thoughts on the atmosphere at the Sree Kanteerava Stadium?

This is a good atmosphere. I love to play in this kind of an atmosphere, even if it is against us.