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Soccer News of Monday, 21 June 2004

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No Excuse, Ghana was better -Bafana Coach

Bafana Bafana coach Stuart Baxter refused to blame his side's under-par performance against Ghana on the fact that the team only arrived in Kumasi on Saturday night, despite many of the players turning in a lacklustre performance.

"I do not think that this affected us, we can play that game again and again and the result is unlikely to change, it just didn't happen for us," the England-born coach said in the post-match interview.

However, he admitted that Bafana Bafana played well below their best as they were only to produce the standard of play that they are capable of for short periods.

"We are very disappointed with the result. We tried to lock the game up for the first 20 minutes so that the home crowd could start to pressurise Ghana, but that obviously did not happen as they scored in this period," he said.

"As the game wore on they seemed to get used to the conditions and grew in confidence throughout the game, while we only managed to show patches of what we are capable of."

Baxter now has two weeks to prepare the team for their next challenge, a tricky encounter against Burkina Faso at home, and he will be hoping that the likes of Shaun Bartlett, Sibusiso Zuma and Benni McCarthy will be available for that game.