Mumbai City FC head coach Des Buckingham stressed on the importance of maintaining the tempo throughout the match as they suffered a disappointing 2-4 loss to Odisha FC in their Hero Indian Super League (ISL) 2021-22 match at the Tilak Maidan Stadium, in Vasco, on Monday evening.

Buckingham addressed the questions put forward by the media during the post-match press conference.

Here are the excerpts from the press conference:

Do you feel that this is Mumbai City FC’s worst game of the season?

I think in the first half we were exceptional. I think we played some extremely good football to go 2-1 up, and I felt we should have been more. We played some really good attacking football, how we want to play, and we defended extremely well and that didn't continue in the second half. And that's something disappointing not just for me, but for the team. And that's something that we need to address to go into the next game against SC East Bengal.

Mumbai City FC’s policy has been to score one more goal than the opponents, but conceding 10 goals in the last three games, is it asking a bit too much from the team?

We will win games one-nil or five-four, but it's important the football we played in the first half. That's how we want to play, and it's important that we try and play that over the 90 minute period and not a 45 minute one. And if we can start doing that and showing signs of that throughout the season, I'll be very pleased, but we again need to make sure that we defend a lot better than we have this evening.

Do you think that the goals conceded were avoidable?

Yeah, I think so. I think it was a different type of game, they've had four shots on target and have scored all four goals. So the last couple of games have been (because of) transitional moments. Whereas tonight for me, it was more mistakes where we've offered opportunities on our goal.

Deshorn Brown scored a hat-trick against Mumbai City FC in the previous game and Jerry Mawihmingthanga was involved in three goals tonight. Do you think better man marking is required?

I think we just need to be better individually, and I think we need to be better as a collective. There's a lot of things that we need to do to prevent the ball getting to where it does, in the goal. So again, those areas as a team we will work on and then we need to make sure individually we defend as well as we can.