All Whites coach Danny Hay says his side needs to be “far more clinical in the attacking third” but his team is on track to achieve that.
His comments followed Thursday’s 1-0 loss to Australia’s Socceroos at Brisbane’s Suncorp Stadium in a game where New Zealand created plenty of goalscoring chances but failed to hit the net.
“This is part of our evolution. We’ve got to become far more clinical in the attacking third and that’s just something we’re working on developing and that’s going to happen over time,” Hay told a post-match media conference.
“We created a number of chances, I think the majority of the chances that Australia created were generally off the back of mistakes from us. But again, they’re mistakes where we are trying to do things that we think are right.”
New Zealand goalkeeper Oli Sail said he thought the All Whites were the better team in Brisbane.
“(The) performance was once again pretty impressive, the courage to build up from the back, showed courage on the ball in tight spaces,” he said.
“I thought, if we looked at it honestly, box to box, we were the better team. But as we continue our evolution of a team that plays some really attractive football, it’s also important to look back at our history of how we used to win games by being the better team in both boxes.
“We continue to move forward and take the right steps in terms of the type of football we’re playing, and box to box, I’d argue we were the better team. We can be happy with our performance.”
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Post-match interviews
Here’s what Danny Hay and Oli Sail had to say after the match:
Match highlights
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