FC Pune City’s semi-final hopes ended on Wednesday evening following a 3-2 defeat at the hands of NorthEast United FC in the 2015 Hero Indian Super League. The Stallions will now play Chennaiyin FC on December 5 and if they can beat the Super Machans, they will pave the way for NorthEast into the semis. Pune head coach David Platt made it clear following the defeat at the Indira Gandhi Stadium in Guwahati that they will not take the next match lightly and will try to beat Marco Materazzi’s men.

“…You play 14 games in this league, not 13. We’ve got to give it the utmost respect, both in terms of our preparation, which starts now, in terms of our recovery and we will travel back to Pune tomorrow and we will be on the training pitch on Friday. We will try to recover on Friday and I will try to pick a football team on Saturday against Chennai and that’s the way it is,” Platt told reporters after the match.

Talking about the game that saw Nicolas Velez, Diomansy Kamara and Andre Bikey score for the Highlanders and James Bailey and Adrian Mutu for the Stallions, the Englishman said: “I think we dominated the second half. I think we played well in the second half. I have to give credit to the group of players. This is not easy. Coming to India and produce performances every two or three days is not easy. Full credit to NorthEast United FC. They have got themselves into the fourth place and it’s up to us on Saturday to do something that keeps them there. But we would not do it for NorthEast, we will do it for ourselves.”

When asked where things went wrong for his team on Wednesday, Platt said: “They got three, we got two. We’ve been punished a few times this season for our errors, which we should not be making. Unfortunately, we went a goal down very early in the game. We got ourselves back into the game but we should not have gone 2-1 down, which we did.

“I made a couple of changes, just tweaked it a little bit and then we conceded a goal from a soft set-piece. It was like shooting in the foot, a little bit, because just before half time to go down 3-1 was a bit of a downer. I still thought we could get back into the game, because I felt that we were creating chances.

“…There are very few positives to take from this match because we are out of contention now. But I feel that the second half performance was good enough to get back into the game and maybe make it 3-3… But really the third goal killed us because we had only 45 minutes to come back from a very difficult position.”