Éric Sékou Chelle,  Mali national team head coach described his players as group of talented young players that will surely make serious impact in the nearest future.

Speaking immediately after his boys lost their quarter final match against Cote D'iviore, Chelle said "this is really difficult for us to digest, we managed to put up a great match, this was a great match indeed and in the last minutes, we collapsed". 

"We decided to comeback to a system of 5 defenders because there were lot of balls in the air and we had to manage that." 

"I am sad for the players because this generation of players are talented and they deserve more. I think there are a lot of teams that can’t do what my team is doing right now. I asked my players to play to win and we had a good game, lot of interesting situations, we had two penalties and only one was given We saw a hand with the ball that was not awarded, this is something we need to take a look at and the red card was a legitimate one" he concluded.