No starting XI guarantee for super-sub Duric

The seven-time Great Eastern-YEO's S.League winner came into the current campaign on the back of a good run of form, after firing Singapore to the 2012 AFF Suzuki Cup title.

However, Duric has found himself starting from the bench for Tampines' first two league games of the new season.

Although the 42-year-old came on as a substitute to score the opening goal for Bacina's men in their game against the Thursday's game against the Young Lions, the Stags boss told FOX SPORTS that rotation was still the name of the game for his team.

"He is part of the team and we're trying to rotate all the players," Bacina explained. "We are strong enough, so we can change the players any time.

"When one goes out; another goes in. This time, it was Aleks' [Duric's] turn to come inside and he managed to score the goal - definitely the winning goal for us - so all of them they play their part,"

"Even Firdaus [Kasman] in the first half played well but I changed him because I wanted to bring a different type of play - something more penetrative with Jamil [Ali]. That means Firdaus and all the substitutes and all the players which I changed, as like Shahdan [Sulaiman]; they did well."

Prior to Duric's effort, Tampines dictated proceedings in front of Rudy Khairullah's goal, but were unsuccessfully in their conversion attempts.

Nonetheless, Bacina refused to read too much into his players' struggles in front of goal.

"This is football," he stated. "Sometimes even if you dominate for 90 minutes or 80 minutes, and have possession of more than 80%, it doesn't mean you have to win.

"I congratulate the Young Lions and Aide Iskandar because they defended very well. They came here with the game plan to play on the counterattack and they did very well.

"They put us in trouble at the back but we managed to maintain our clean sheet and towards the end, to score. "

"We had a lot of chances to be honest. Against Geylang International [a 5-0 win last Wednesday] we didn't create so many chances but we managed to score five. Tonight [Thursday] we creted a lot but we scored only two."

The Stags' next challenge is a potentially tricky AFC Cup encounter with Vietnamese side Sai Gon Xuan Thanh, and Bacina conceded that he knew very little about their upcoming opponents.

"To be honest, at the moment, I don't have much information about Sai Gon [Xuan Thanh],
 he added. "They haven't started their league; they start their league in the next two days.

"I found out today [Thursday] they changed their coach because they lost in the Charity Shield. I'm not quite sure about the result but I read about it in the Vietnamese papers, so I'll try to find out more about them.

 "Definitely, it won't be easy, but they are coming to Singapore. We are the home team, so we will try to put in the effort to collect three points from the first match."

Tampines will be looking to better their performance in the AFC Cup last year, where they were eliminated in the group stages.