Chennaiyin FC head coach Marco Materazzi was gracious in his side’s 3-1 defeat by Delhi Dynamos FC in their 2016 Hero Indian Super League game at the Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium in Chennai on Thursday.

Marcelinho scored a brace, while super-sub Badara Badji scored once late in the game to help the Lions to an easy win against the defending champions. Speaking to the media following the game, Materazzi acknowledged his opponents’ clear superiority on the night.

“We didn’t play well. I want to congratulate Delhi because they deserved to win. And now it’s my responsibility at least for the next game to show them that we are going to fight. It’s also the responsibilities of the players but mostly mine. And we’ll show that we can fight back,” the Italian told reporters.

“It was a lack of hunger, you could see that because we were losing 3-1, and still Delhi had more ball possession, for 3-4 minutes. So four days ago we were a good team in my point of view, but now we couldn’t have been worse than this.

“Definitely there was lack of pace and since the quality of the league has increased, every mistake you make you’ll have to pay for it. We actually did six, seven, eight pretty bad mistakes so, actually we were lucky that the score was only 3-1.”

Materazzi also stayed away from criticising defender Nallapan Mohanraj, who didn’t have a good day at the office. “Maybe Mohanraj needs more time to integrate into the team, but I think we can’t blame a single player because when we win, we win together, when we lose, we lose together,” he said.

The Italian put the whole match into perspective. “Yes, the whole defence was suffering as the whole team was stretched playing together. I think the first 10 minutes, we played very good, and then we had a 1-1 score-line. We had to be more intelligent, we had to show some hunger, and then they scored another goal. At that moment it was not good for us, it became 2-1 and from there on it all went down. So I want to congratulate Delhi again for the win and also because of many mistakes from our side,” Materazzi said.