AFCON friendly: What Jose Peseiro said after defeat to Ecuador

Super Eagles new manager, Jose Peseiro has reacted to his side loss to Ecuador in only his second game in charge.

Peseiro, 62, believes the Super Eagles were brilliant in the last 75 minutes of the match and his side should have been awarded at least one penalty during the game.

The Super Eagles team suffered from an early goal and they couldn’t get back on level terms after some fantastic football especially in the second 45 minutes.

When asked about what he needs to do to get his team to reciprocate their second half performance against Mexico and Ecuador in the entire game. Jose Peseiro commented that “I think against Mexico in the first half we didn’t play good, but today I think the last the 30 minutes of the first half [we played well],

“The first 15 minutes, we didn’t play well, the way we can, because we have players who can control the match, move the ball, command the game but we could not [play well] in the first 15 minutes, and after the first 15 minutes we played very good.

“The second half [we played] much better, but it’s not easy [to] pressure [for] 90 minutes like we did in the second half, it’s not easy,

“Even though I don’t want to speak about referees, at least [we should have been awarded] one penalty, of course [there’s] no VAR, [it was a] clear penalty, goalkeeper touching [fouling] our striker. If the striker or midfielder scores the penalty for us< [it would have been] 1-1 for this match,

“Anybody can commit mistakes, the players, referees can commit mistakes, I commit [mistakes] also,

“Today, [Nigeria] played much better than against Mexico. In the next match, we’ll play much better than this match. …

Peseiro was asked about the mindset of his team going into this game after the loss to Mexico.

“Today, we played much better than against Mexico,” Peseiro replied

“In the second half, I think we did very good,

“But today I think we pressured more, created more opportunities. We created opportunities against Mexico but today I think we created much more opportunities, more pressure, more organization.

“Against Mexico, we trained two times only, some player only once

” We’ve done training 4 times after that time, for that I think we must improve. “

Nigeria will now face Sierria Leone on June 9 and São Tomé and Principe four days later in the 2023 AFCON Qualifiers.