Football-CAF Champions League - Cotonsport of Cameroon's coach Jean Denis Lavagne has blamed the water-logged pitch at the Aba stadium for its loss to home team Enyimba of Nigeria in their final group game of the 2011 CAF Champions League over the weekend. Cotonsports's 2-0 loss to Enyimba made it possible for Al Hilal of Sudan to advance to the semi-finals, even though the Sudanese club played goalless at Raja Casablanca of Morocco in their own final game.

Al Hilal finished on 8 points, one ahead of Cotonsport in group A, which was won by Enyimba. Only the top two teams in each of the two groups advanced to the last four.

'We played on a massively water logged pitch. In such circumstances, there was nothing anybody could do to have good control of the ball,' coach Lavagne said in an interview with cafonline, the official website of African soccer governing body, CAF.

He said the officials should have stopped the match when it became clear that the ball could no longer bounce to an appreciable height.

'I feel frustrated because we have simply lost to natural conditions. One would have expected that Enyimba would outplay our team in all departments. During the first half when the conditions were still okay, we put up strong resistance and only expected that we would do better in the second half until the rain killed our joy,' he said.

Cotonsport's woes were compounded by the sending off of one of its players.

On the team's future plans, Lavagne said 'we would go home to prepare for our domestic league. We believe this is not the end of road for CotonSport.'

Pana 20/09/2011