FC Pune City head coach David Platt experienced a tough day on Wednesday as his team faced a 2-1 loss to Delhi Dynamos FC, their first in the 2015 Hero Indian Super League after two wins, but he was pleased with the way his team played after conceding fairly early into the match.“Strangely enough, I am more pleased with today’s performance than with our previous two games. I think when you go a goal behind, you quickly run out of time to get back into the game since teams defend deep and they limit the options to score. So, the disappointing thing is that a goal was given by a set-piece, by a free header at the back post and the goal wasn’t created against us. People say if we hadn’t conceded, we would have levelled things but I think the same goes for Delhi too,” Platt told reporters after the match.“Did we have enough chances to win the game? Possibly yes, we created a good number of chances. But what we can’t do is feel sorry for ourselves because we are on the training pitch again tomorrow.”Pune started conservatively but upped the ante later, and Platt said: “I think in the first half, we didn’t create much. We played morelong, more straight and when we went into good positions, we were frightened to pull the trigger. In the second half, we had more attempts on goal.”The match also saw the return of Jackichand Singh and Eugeneson Lyngdoh from national duty and commenting on their participation, Platt said, “Jackichand [who was replaced by Lyngdoh in the second half] could have carried on. In terms of tiredness, we worked to get them back early which we did. Jacki was fine. He took a lot of kicks and that kept him out. He was struggling to continue due to the knocks he got, and not the fatigue. Eugeneson came on and did exceptionally well in that position.”But was it important for both of them to play today? “I didn’t want to risk starting both. We made sure they slept all day, spoke to Jacki before the game to see if he was alright. If it was not such a long travel back home, maybe I would have done that. But I knew they were physically tired to finish 90 mins, I was never going to start with them both,” Platt said.The game saw Lenny Rodrigues play on the right. Explaining his strategy, Platt said, “Sometimes you’ve got to look at the opposition and look at the players that they’ve got. We identified Gustavo Dos Santos as a big danger for us on that left hand side. That’s why I put the pace of [Dharmaraj] Ravanan on that right hand side to counter Dos Santos. Sometimes it is hard when you come up against a player of that quality, who is so good on his feet and so quick and to deal with him one on one. I knew I’d get that from Lenny."Isn’t he taking a chance by using ‘different’ strategies? “They’re not experiments,” said Platt. “They are teams picked on the basis of getting through the games physically. We had a game tonight and one on Saturday and that’s two games in 72 hours. That’s not easy in this heat. When you lose, people will always turn back and question, should you have done this or that. Even I think that, but the be all and end all is we feel that we have a group of players that can all go out and perform and we will continue to look at games and proximity of games and continue to utilize and rotate the squad the best way we can,” he added.
