With both team at the bottom of table struggling to get there season started it was meant to be a drama game. It started on the morning for us trying to make a few call to get a keeper. Thanks to Jeremy for helping us out. After our last 4 games where we played well for 70min and poorly finished our games conceding many last min goals we decided to try to do it the other way around. Nippon basically out run for the first 30min where we could barely have a breather. Ball moving from side to side and early in the game they got the deserved opener coming from free kick deflected at the first post to finally end up on the second with the Nippon guy scoring easily. Our nightmare continued when 5 min later a again after making us run all around they manage to release their midfielder by slipping the ball between our 2 center back. He made no mistake and won his duel against the keeper to make it 2-0 after 15min. The next 15min was just us running, running, shooting, running and slowly somewhere we managed to get into our game and play some football for the last 10min and could have even close the gap on the scrolling when Remi missed his 1vs1 after a good ball from Ouss. Angle was thigh and the keeper did well to dive into his feet and prevent the goal. 0-2 HT Coach Simon re shuffled the team a bit and brought some fresh leg on the pitch with Max and Steve. Nippon high tempo slow down in second half and soon we started to create some trouble on the wings. Remi obtained a penalty well converted by Ali to make it 1-2. At this stage it was kinda miraculous. This goal kinda hammered the Nippon that struggled to reproduce the same football they did in first half. We started to win more ball in midfield which simplified the transition and managed to get the equalizer like that. A ball quickly retrieve in midfield to release Remi on the wing that lower crossed for MaxG that made no mistake. 2-2 before water break. Last 20min the game evened a bit even though Nippon was really only dangerous on corners and should have taken the lead again when they had a clear header from a corner that we were lucky to see go wide. Minutes later Remi got the second penalty that Ali made no mistake again to convert to give us the lead with 10min to go. This time we did not break and hold the results until the end and Sam even scored the 4th one in the dying minutes to secure our 1st win of the season. 4-2 1 st half... no comment 2nd half, a Cameroun Lions like fighting spirit. Some good football and well, 4 goals... MOM OG: Philip for an overall solid performance as always.
We were leading the game by 2-0 at the first half. We were dominating the game. Off-side was consistently inaccurate throughout the game. Something wrong started happen in the last half. Two penalty was given to OG. Our defender insisted there were no physical contact at the one penalty given. There were miscommunication between referees. They lost control of the game. Then OG revitalized they started overwhelm us to beat us. The referee judgement worked unfair for us. This is the reason for the referee rating.