“I hope they start looking at us with respect,” says Alfaro Costa Rica’s coach, Argentine Gustavo Alfaro, expressed his wish for his team to be viewed with more respect after their debut this Monday in the 2024 United States Copa América with a goalless draw against Brazil.
“I hope they start looking at us with respect, because we are a team that will fight with order, fight until the end,” he said in a press conference after the match played in Inglewood, Los Angeles (California), for the first day of Group D. “Everyone had written us off before the movie even started,” he maintained. “It’s a nice reward for all these boys.”
Alfaro, 61, highlighted the performance of his players, the youngest squad in the tournament with an average age of 24.7 years, against the five-time world champions.
“Except for Francisco Calvo and Joel Campbell, this was the first match of this nature that they played. The difference was very big, we knew it was very big, the issue is that on the field we did everything humanly possible to level it,” he stated.
The coach acknowledged that his team fell short in offensive tasks, as they didn’t take a single shot on Alisson’s goal, but they fulfilled their defensive duties, where goalkeeper Patrick Sequeira had an outstanding performance.
“One of the things I told them in the first half was: do you want me to tell you the truth or lie to you? They asked for the truth. ‘If we keep playing like this, we will most likely lose the match. If we don’t force Brazil to retreat, we can’t resist 90 minutes like this,’” he said.
“These are things that we still need to work on, hopefully this match, this lesson, this challenge we have faced, will help us grow. The important thing is that the boys had the composure, the ability to navigate the discomfort, to suffer,” he concluded.
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