John Herdman believes he was right to ditch Rangers star Scott Arfield from his Gold Cup team despite them crashing to defeat against Mexico.
The Premiership star was surprisingly dropped from the Canadian starting XI for their crunch clash, although he did come on as a second half sub.
Arfield had netted a double for Canada in their final warm-up game for the tournament against Trinidad and Tobago and scored in the opening game against Martinique, but was still dumped to the bench.
Mexico cruised to a 3-1 win against the North American side, but Herdman backed his decision to start the game without the Rangers man.
He said: "I decided to mix things up and made six changes for the game. It means important players like Scott Arfield will be fresh for the last game against Cuba.
"It was a good test for us and while I am never happy to be on the losing side, we learned a lot about ourselves.
"We need to beat Cuba to qualify for the next round and these changes were necessary to ensure we have the best chance of doing that.
"We created a lot of chances in the last 15 minutes or so and we take a lot of positives for that. Overall we will learn our lessons from this game and look forward to our next opportunity."
