Sharida targetting Australia

Bahrain coach Salman Sharida has Australia in his sights after seeing off India 5-2 in Asian Cup Group C on Friday.

A first-half hat-trick from Ismail Abdullahatif put Bahrain in control, but Sunil Chhetri pulled a goal back to make it 4-2 eight minutes into the second half.

Bahrain went down to 10 men just after the hour mark, but netted a fifth before seeing out the remainder of the match to set-up a must-win final game against Australia on Tuesday.

“I told the players India had nothing to lose in the second half,” Sharida said.

“We took what we needed and we got the points. We wanted more goals, but Faouzi Aaish was sent off, so we took what we had and we will now focus on the next match.”

“Our focus was to get three points against India and to have a big result.”

“We never thought of Australia but now we will try our best to play well against them and fix the mistakes that we had tonight.”

“Realistically, Australia and Korea Republic are the favourites to go through,” he said.

“After winning tonight, we revived our chances and we will concentrate on getting a win against Australia because we have no other option.”

India’s second defeat in two matches sees them bow out of the competition at the group stage, but India coach Bobby Houghton was nevertheless proud of the fight shown by his players.

“It was a tough game. It’s a tough group and it’s a big challenge for us to play against opponents like ours,” Houghton said.

“We congratulate Bahrain for a good win.”

“From our perspective, I think the one thing we can say is we have a team that don’t give up.”

“At 4-2, there was a spell where we could have got back into the game.”

Houghton also used the opportunity to issue another public criticism of what he perceives to be a lack of investment from the All Indian Football Federation.

“This tournament is good for us for two reasons,” he added.

“The first reason is that it shows that our federation and sports authorities need to step up and we need to have more infrastructure.”

“The second one is that I believe it is good for the profile of football in India and it will be helped by this.”