MEXICO-ANGOLA: Coaches' Quotes

16 June 2006

Luis Oliveira GONCALVES (ANG)
It was a good performance. Mexico are very strong and it’s not easy to play against them. My congratulations to both teams for the great game we saw tonight. I think I can safely say this is the best ever result in the history of Angolan football.

It’s our first World Cup and after two games we’ve already got a point. The whole country celebrated the performance against Portugal and they’ll obviously be celebrating this point against Mexico even more. We had two objectives when we came here: to do our country and our continent proud and I think we achieved that to perfection in this game. The match tonight was much harder than the one against Portugal, and Iran will be even tougher still.

Ricardo LA VOLPE (MEX)
We played pretty well. There was only one team out there and that was Mexico. The problem is, when the ball doesn’t want to go in, it doesn’t go in. Some games are like that, and the Angola keeper put in an extraordinary performance as well. Angola played just as we expected them to and were very defensive.

We’ll have to look closely at why we didn’t score, though. I thought we were direct enough, but the problem was that the midfield was packed full of Angola players and we had to move the ball around a lot to try and pull them out of position. On reflection, I think perhaps we lacked the killer ball in the final third. We know full well there are no easy games in a World Cup, and this game was far from easy.