Guernsey ‘will get stronger’
GUERNSEY manager Chris Tardif was lost for words after seeing his side suffer a dramatic late loss in Friday night’s final at the 2019 Ynys Mon Island Games football tournament.
Immensely proud of his team, given that they played over 75 minutes with 10 men, they also missed a penalty which would have seen them go 2-0 up, but Tardif was not dwelling on that.
‘It’s difficult to sum up how I feel right now, emotions are too raw to digest it properly, it will take a couple of days to sink in and really pick the bones out of it.
‘I’m genuinely super proud of this group – super, super proud. If you told me four weeks ago [we’d get to the final], I would have bitten your arm off. Now we got there, we want to go on and win it and I think we had opportunities to.
‘Watching the first hour of that game, you wouldn’t have known who was down to 10 men. We still had great chance, the penalty but fair play to the goalkeeper, it was a great save. But I’m super proud of them, it’s just hard to digest. They are absolutely gutted and rightly so, but come tomorrow and in the coming weeks, they’ll look at it and be really proud and so they should be.
‘Despite going down to 10 men, they wore their badge with pride and gave absolutely everything they had. I can’t ask more of any of them, we’ll push on. It’s a young group, and exciting one, and we will continue to get stronger and stronger.
‘They’re playing some really good football and that will only keep improving as long as we keep them together.’
Match report in Monday's Guernsey Press.
