Despite four successive losses, NorthEast United FC head coach Nelo Vingada believes his players can turn their 2016 Hero ISL campaign around when they take on Atlético de Kolkata at the Rabindra Sarobar Stadium in Kolkata on Thursday evening. With just one point from their last five games, the Highlanders find themselves in a precarious situation in the bottom half of the table. However, their cause is not entirely lost and they can get back in semis contention with a win tomorrow.“Tomorrow is another game, our beginning was fantastic but the last four losses have put us in a difficult situation. In life and in football, we have seen that nothing is impossible. No one has qualified and no one is out yet. It will be hard but nothing is impossible. We can overcome this situation. We made some important mistakes which cost us the results and we should have had more points than we have right now,” Vingada, whose side has 10 points from nine games, told reporters on Wednesday.“We can show tomorrow that we are here to fight to overcome the situation and we still have a chance to qualify. In their last game, Kolkata played very well against Delhi and they were superior. Tomorrow will be a crucial game for us and we hope for a positive result and we will be out on the pitch to win.”Vingada also defended his players saying even the best players in the world weren’t immune to mistakes. “This has happened with the Barcelona goalkeeper [referring to one goalkeeping mistake by Wellington Gomes against Mumbai City FC in a 1-0 loss at Guwahati], happened with Manuel Neuer, so it has happened to all the players. Football is so attractive because mistakes like this happen. Sometimes it’s not because of more or less experience but it happens in the moment. However, these mistakes happened with us more than usual so we now hope to end it,” he said.“You know when you are working with a team, you have a strategy and we have a set team but with injuries we need to change the team and also one or two times we needed to change the way we were playing… I assume the responsibility of everything happening with the team and the results, but sometimes some things that happen during the game can destroy the plan, so now we are working more on the mental plan than the technical plan. I believe tomorrow we have more options as we have some injured players back, and even [Emiliano] Alfaro is back [from a suspension due to yellow card accumulation].”When asked in light of their performance of late how he was keeping the bunch motivated, the 63-year-old Portuguese said: “...Now we need to be reborn for the situation and the matches with the same attitude we had in the first few games, so this is the same team which won in the beginning against good opponents. In the games we won, we did make mistakes and in the games we lost we made crucial mistakes. Now we don’t have many games to spare, so we have to play for results and we have to win the games.”Responding to a query whether it was defending or scoring that had him more worried, Vingada said: “…We have conceded eight goals and it’s fine but the problem is we are missing many chances, so if we see the reports of the games we can see that our team has created many chances but has not been able to convert and that has become a major problem.”
