•Coach Nowak

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United States’ Under-23 Head Coach, Peter Nowak, has sensationally said his boys would go all out to stop the enterprising Nigerian team in the Beijing Olympic Games’ football event.

He said his boys still had unfinished business against Nigeria’s Dream Team and would use Wednesday’s duel to conclude it. According to him, Nigeria would be difficult to beat and he was already thinking about what to do to scale through the hurdle.

“Freddy and Michael will not play against Nigeria, but as I said, from the beginning, it’s all about the group. The 18 players we’ve chosen have to be up to the challenge,” Nowak said.

“As I said to the boys in the locker room, it’s just how the game goes sometimes. You have to handle it right, and not get your heads down.

“We have some unfinished business, and we’ll go into Wednesday’s game against Nigeria fully prepared. Any result other than a loss will give us a pass to the quarterfinals. Maybe we would have taken care of that business (on Sunday against the Netherlands), but before that game, I don’t think anyone gave us a chance to play like we did against the European Champions. Let’s not forget about that. The Netherlands are the European Champions and we came close to beating them in that encounter.

“I gave the boys a big compliment in the locker room. They were disappointed on Sunday night, but tomorrow, it’s back to business,” he said.
On thier match against Netherland, he said: “It was quite a fight. We had to adjust after about 20 minutes, changed our set up and started to play our game.
“After that, we had a couple of good chances, and I told the boys at halftime that they had to believe in themselves that with the names on the Dutch team and their big clubs, it doesn’t matter. If we were going to put forth the effort, then we could still win the game.

“You could see in the first half that we could win the game and we scored two great goals. Before the game, we talked about how to play our game and how to exploit the spaces that the Dutch team would leave us. I think we had the chance to finish the game and win it, but now we still have some unfinished business.

“We’re going to Beijing to finish our business on Wednesday.
“Before the game, no one really gave us a chance, and we competed. Maybe in the first couple of minutes we were a little nervous, but then we settled down. We can look at that game as the glass is half full. Of course, we’re disappointed because we came very close.

“There’s nothing we can do about it now. We have to finish our chances and be alert from the beginning to the end. For those 70-something minutes we did a great job and the Dutch, I think, got a little lucky.