The Costa Rica National Soccer Team, La Sele, fell 1-0 to Tunisia in the friendly match disputed this Tuesday, March 27 at the Allianz Rivera de Nice Stadium.

Head coach Oscar Ramirez, tested the waters with a different lineup than the one the had against Scotland, but the experiment didn’t work, far from that it made the national team look uncomfortable and limited.

Tunisia displayed speed and was able to make Costa Rica look bad, taking the ball from them without much effort.

The goal by Tunisia came at minute 36’ of the first half by Wahbi Khazre who took advantage of a big mistake made by Kendall Waston that left Keylor Navas to deal with the attack alone.

“It was an important international friendly game. Tunisia showed a very different dynamic, with a great possession of the ball, which was hard for us to interpret and control the ball (…) in the second half we managed to stabilize the match and we went on a toe to toe that could have given us a tie. It was important to see the new players which is what we wanted”, stated Ramirez in the press conference.

In general the Costa Rican defense has good players that in most cases are able to respond well even when the rival team has good resources; the weakness is more evident in the offensive line where there are few options and at times there is not a good companionship, the attack lacks planning, strength and pressure.

It seems as though the coaching team takes long to make changes when things are evidently not working well, it has become very common for Ramirez to switch players and make changes when there are only 10 or even 5 minutes left in the game and much of the damage is already done and the game is hard to turn around in the little time left.

Costa Rica concludes with this game the only two friendly matches scheduled, the team will not play again until June 3 when they will measure up against Ireland at the Costa Rica National Stadium.