Danny Blind spoke to NOS after his team’s 2-1 home defeat to Greece in Eindhoven and reiterated the importance of winning their opening World Cup qualifying game in Sweden on Tuesday.
- By James Rowe
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The defeat against Greece was the Oranje’s 5th consecutive international home defeat and reignited calls for Blind to be sacked as head coach.
Speaking after the game, Blind said, ”As the manager I must analyze and look at how things can become better. We started well and created chances but in the case of Greece they did not create too much. I believe they have 3 chances and scored two goals tonight. Our midfield started strong but we gave away the initiative away in the midfield and lost concentration and gave second balls away. In friendly matches we were on a winning run of 4 games away from home. I do believe that when Greece equalized our heads dropped. We had the control but we could not go on to win the game in the second half.
” believe that this game has no bearing whatsoever on our upcoming match against Sweden and it is my task to reiterate that to my players that this result does not matter. You always take something from these games but our goal remains the same and that is that we must win in Sweden and it would have been nice to go to Sweden having obtained a good victory tonight but we also have to have the feeling that we want to put something right. I am completely convinced that in Sweden on Tuesday you will see a different team that the one that played the last hour of tonight’s game.
”I have previously stated that I would not change the starting line up too much but nevertheless it will not be an identical team but the foundation of tonight’s team will be the base upon which we work from. I still believe that we will get a good result in Sweden that is not just an expletive I base that opinion on how we as a group have manifested ourselves in training this week in terms of quality and cooperation with one another because you can see that they all want to go to the World Cup in Russia but to state the intention is not enough we have to do it.”
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Ja, we must win…..but we won’t!