Written by: Phoon Jia Hui

Even though his side were on the end of a heavy 4-1 defeat to Warriors FC at Choa Chu Kang Stadium on Monday evening, Tanjong Pagar United coach Patrick Vallee refused to pin any blame on his players and was keen to bounce back.

“I cannot blame the players tonight for this game because they tried their best and it’s like this in football sometimes,” the 52-year-old said after the match.

“We have to analyse what happened during this game, it’s just one game and we will continue to keep working.”

He however did not want to dwell on the result too much and revealed he had an eye on their RHB Singapore Cup quarter-final tie against Tampines Rovers with the first leg match scheduled for this Friday.

“I am not disappointed, just a bit frustrated with the goals we conceded especially the second goal which came so fast after we equalised.

“More importantly, we have to be ready for Friday and Tuesday for the RHB Singapore Cup. We will see what happens; hopefully we can put up a good fight against a good team like Tampines.

“Sometimes you need to handle your team, this week we got three strong games including the RHB Singapore Cup. I tried to make some changes to the team tonight to keep my players fit and fresh for the next two games.”

Warriors coach Alex Weaver meanwhile agreed that it was the perfect response to their recent run of games where they were winless for three matches prior to this and was pleased with what he saw from his charges.

“I thought we did extremely well,” said the Englishman.

“We had a gameplan to come up with certain things which we achieved. We executed it in both halves and we did very well.

“I thought our players were excellent, all the way from Hassan [Sunny] our goalkeeper, to our forwards but I thought [Miroslav] Pejic could have done a little better sometimes.”