Bangladesh Under-16 women’s football team got a reality check after suffering a humiliating 0-9 loss to mighty North Korea in their opening match of the AFC Under-16 Championship in Thailand on Monday. North Korea are not only the defending champions of this tournament but they are also the reigning Under-17 Women’s World Cup champions. The big defeat showed the gulf of difference between the teams, highlighting the fact that need to improve a lot if they are to compete against the top teams in Asia.
This was for the first time that the Bangladeshi girl’s played in such a big stage and but it yielded no unexpected result.
Keeping the gap in his mind coach Golam Rabbani Choton appeared very little disappointed.
‘Korea is very strong side in every aspect,’ Choton said.
‘They are the best team at all age level of the world. Yesterday [Monday] some of our players could not play their natural game and our goalkeeper [Roksana] made some mistakes; otherwise the result could be less than four of five goals.
‘Now all the players understand that they are far behind than the world standard. This tournament will help us to improve our football.’
Bangladesh midfielder Maria Manda said they tried their best to restrict the Korean girls.
‘We tried hard to play our natural game but they [Korea] are better than us physically and their running is also better than us which was why we failed to restrict them,’ said Manda.
‘Now we are trying to rectify our mistakes that we did in the first match and we hope to play better football in our next two matches.’
Bangladesh had an hour-long training session at the Institute of Physical Education Chonburi Campus on Tuesday.
Bangladesh will face Japan in their second match on Thursday.
-With New Age input
