Written By: Kenneth Ho

Tanjong Pagar coach Patrick Vallee insisted it was not his side’s best performance this season despite them coming off their biggest margin win this season after a 5-0 victory over Harimau Muda.

Vallee initially expressed his happiness to see his side scoring goals freely in a run that has seen them won three of their last four games.

“I’m very happy, not only for this game, but with the game we played in the last result. They tried to show everybody their standard, and it is a good way and I’m very happy with the five goals we scored tonight, and a clean sheet; a clean sheet for me is always very important,” Vallee had told the press.

“We can thrash them more if we are sometimes more efficient and accurate, it is a big pleasure to see my team perform like that for the last round. We have secured the ninth spot and now we want to finish the season well.”

However, Vallee was adamant his side had played better games, only not to secure a result in those games.

“It wasn’t the best ‘best’”, he said. “Yes everybody can say it is the best because it is 5-0, it is very good because we managed defensively to secure the clean sheet and offensively we were very accurate to score five goals.

“My team deserved better this year, this is football, we must accept this and we will come back better next season.”

Harimau coach Razip Ismail was left disappointed by the scoreline, especially since his side ended their last home game of the season in such disastrous fashion.

After assessing that his side had started the game well and was unfortunate to see several shots come of the bar or denied by Tanjong Pagar goalkeeper Aurelien Herisson, Razip was stumped as to what happened after that.

“I don’t know what happened to the performance of the players, I couldn’t believe that we lost 5-0 tonight, I don’t have any answers to that,” Razip said.

“The amount of chances we created we deserve one ot two goals, throughout the match i think we are struggling, we kept on making mistakes and put ourselves under pressure and i think thats what happened.”

The loss meant that Harimau now are still level on points with Woodlands Wellington, but sit at the bottom of the table with an inferior goal difference.

With the five goals conceded severely setting Harimau back, Razip admitted that he was unsure whether his side could lift themselves off the root of the table with one more game to go before the season concludes.

“It has been very long since we beat our opponents at home, and this was the best time. We still have a chance to go above Woodlands but I don’t know.”