Ambriz concerned by Toluca’s toothless display against Tigres

It’s not difficult to see why Toluca’s heavy defeat to Tigres in the first leg of the Clausura 2023 quarter finals has coach Ignacio Ambriz very worried.

Toluca took an early lead with Leo Fernández opening the scoring on eight minutes but everything started to go downhill after that. Tigres were back level within six minutes, ahead by the half-hour and ended up winning the game 4-1. For Ambriz, a highly experienced coach, it was an obvious sign that his team is prone to lapses in concentration and struggle to kill games off. They had opportunities to extend their lead but wasted those chances and were punished for it. Now they have a sizeable but not impossible deficit to turn around in Sunday’s return leg.

“I think that the few chances we had to score we didn’t take - we had a couple of chances to make it 0-2 and if they had gone in, then many things might have changed,” Amriz lamented afterwards. “They equalised after we lost the ball in midfield. Technically, they are a very good team, all of their players are good and we paid for our mistakes - we conceded a penalty. Generally, they were too many mistakes”.

In spite of his team self destructing, Ambriz is confident that Toluca, with home support behind them, can turn the tie back in their favour. “I tried to restructure the team to give us more order, but we’ve come away having conceded four goals and now we have to prepare for Sunday game at our stadium. It’s not impossible, all we need is to have a great second leg performance to book our place in the second round,” the coach confessed. He accepted that they must put the game behind them and focus on Sunday’s return leg, when he is expected to make a few selection changes.

“Nothing is easy in life. We have another 90 minutes ahead that we must play intelligently. I would like nothing more than to shake the team up a bit and force us to react. We are in for a long night. We’ll travel home and get some rest. The first one who has some self-analysis to do is me. We have to improve a lot. We have not given a good account of ourselves like Toluca is expected to do - we need to go back to being a team that always fights to play well,“ he added.

Tough decisions ahead of Sunday’s return leg

Ambriz, who guided León to the title in 2020, concluded that after what happened in the first leg, there will be tough decisions to be made ahead of Sunday’s decider - which potentially could be their last game of the season.

“I have to make decisions about who to field. We have worked well during the break to prepare for this game, and when things don’t work out it is easy to criticize, I never field a player to lose a match - if we had drawn, it would be different, but when the chips are down you have to rise to the occasion and give everything you’ve got. There is a second game left to play and we have to give the best we have, as we always have done when playing at home,” he ended.