AZ failed to start the group stage of the Conference League with a win on Thursday. Pascal Jansen’s team took the lead twice in Denmark at Randers FC, but also gave away the advantageous margin twice: 2-2. Afterwards, Jansen was not only disappointed with the lack of a win, but also with the way in which it was done. “They only need two sets of pieces to keep us in a draw. That says something about how we defend and how we don’t take advantage of our chances.”
“This is very disappointing, if you hand over a match like this”, Jansen said afterwards in conversation with ESPN. “We were able to create quite a few chances. But we just don’t feel comfortable with how we look in two standard situations. We do everything we can to train that and then you see that it is not properly aligned twice.”
Jansen called the course of the game very disappointing. “It is unbelievable that we are handing it over in this way. We get quite a few chances, but we miss them except for two. Then we concede two goals from standard situations. We knew that the opponent would be dangerous in this way, we had trained for that and made agreements about how to prevent that. I didn’t like how the players deal with that in the game.”
AZ simply has to take advantage of more opportunities to achieve better results, said captain Owen Wijndal in turn. “If we score that third goal, there is probably little to worry about.” However, that didn’t happen and that’s why the defender was angry. “For two things really. That we don’t finish the chances of course, but also that we get two balls on target in the back and they both fly in. It was not well defended, not well covered. We were in a good position, but either we didn’t come back fast enough or we didn’t put our head against the ball.”
“They also enforced it a bit in those situations. All very frustrating.” Other than that, there wasn’t much going on, says Wijndal. “We were perhaps a bit sloppy at times, but we were the parent party. But that’s of no use if you don’t win.”