Bronze for Under-19s in Germany

Matt Wells praised the effort and application of our Under-19s during an eventful final day at the Oberndorf tournament in Germany on Sunday.

Having won Group A on Saturday with a game to spare, we produced a superb team performance against FC Schalke 04 in Sunday morning’s semi-final, only to concede a deflected free-kick and slip to a 1-0 defeat.

Naturally disappointed to have been knocked out, the players responded with another strong showing to secure a 1-0 win over Red Bull Salzburg in the third place play-off later in the day – a performance that contributed to us being named ‘Best Attacking Team of the Tournament’ in the post-final awards.

Armando Shashoua was also named in the top two players of the tournament.

Sunday’s events left coach Matt with mixed emotions: “It was disappointing to lose a game that we deserved to win against Schalke,” he told us from Germany. “We won everything except the scoreline. The mentality and level of focus was very impressive, we played well throughout the game, controlled the play and they only had two efforts on target and ended up winning 1-0.

“Like all these tournaments, it’s a story of both penalty boxes. They had one header on target earlier on before scoring the deflected free-kick. On another day we’d want to keep that out but we missed a lot of chances at the other end so it’s an important lesson for the players in the front half of the pitch that we need to take our chances and be clinical in front of goal.”

Having conceded in the 38th minute of the hour-long semi-final, we were forced to settle for a spot in the third place play-off, which happened to be against a Salzburg side to whom we’d lost 3-0 in very disappointing fashion in our last game of the group stage on Saturday.

Thankfully, we produced a far superior performance this time to win 1-0, Jack Roles converting a 44th-minute penalty after striker Troy Parrott was fouled in the area. Dilan Markanday had hit the underside of the bar in the build-up to the penalty incident, while Jeremie Mukendi earlier hit the post when clean through and Roles hooked over from close range as we dominated the play.

“It’s always tough to play in a third-place game and then have to watch the final, but credit to the boys because our mentality was very good, we created a number of chances and along with Schalke it was arguably our best performance of the tournament,” added Matt.

“Overall, though, we’re really disappointed to finish third because in a number of our matches, bar the final group game, we played at a high level but we probably paid the price for not converting our chances.”

Schalke won the competition with a 2-1 victory over Inter Milan in the final.