The Qatari team is looking to compensate against Senegal
The Qatar national football team is looking forward to making amends when it meets its Senegalese counterpart on Friday at Al Thumama Stadium in the second round of Group A of the FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022.
Al-Adam is looking for maintaining his chances in the
competition to qualify for the second round for his group, after he had started
the campaign with a sudden loss against the Ecuadorian national team with two
unanswered goals in the opening match, while the Senegalese national team met
the same fate when it fell by the same result against the Netherlands on
Monday.
The confrontation is crucial for the Spanish coach, Felix
Sanchez, in order to avoid a second loss that may lead to an early exit from
the group stage after the last match against the Dutch team becomes a foregone
conclusion, and therefore victory will remain a requirement so that the Qatari
team does not become the second host to exit from the first round in the
history of the World Cup. After the South African team in the World Cup, which
it hosted on its soil in 2010.
And the players will have to erase the unsatisfactory image
that they appeared in in the last confrontation, as they did not present the
expected offer that corresponds to the size of the lengthy preparations that
they have undergone over the years, during which they accumulated a lot of
experience through global experiences in which they participated in and on
various continents, whether in the Copa America 2019 or The CONCACAF Gold Cup
in 2021 and then the European qualifiers for the FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022™ in
a legal capacity without counting the results, and finally the FIFA Arab Cup
Qatar 2021, not to mention the friendly tests against many strong teams.
The task will not be easy for the Senegalese national team,
which, although it lost to the Netherlands and the World Cup runners-up on
three previous occasions, the last of which was in 2010, but it presented a
great level, as the small details ruled the late fall with goals from Gody
Gakbo in the 84th minute and Dave Klassen in the 90th minute + 9.
Although the Senegalese national team misses the services of
its most prominent star, Sadio Mane, due to the injury that kept him from the
final squad to participate in the finals, but he has stars from big names
active in major European leagues, most notably the English Premier League, such
as Chelsea goalkeeper Edouard Mendy and his colleague in the English team,
captain Kalido. Coulibaly and Baba Sarr of Tottenham, Idrissa Gueye of Everton,
Cheikhou Kouyate of Nottingham Forest, Ismaila Sarr of Watford and other stars
who play in other leagues such as the Spanish League.
Immediately after the loss, coach Felix Sanchez proceeded to
prepare the players, especially from the psychological and moral aspects, in
order to remedy the effects of the sudden failure in the opening, as the coach
held a meeting with the players, during which he tried to keep them away from
any negative effects that would be left by the loss, before starting the
technical work in order to correct the mistakes that he made. It was committed
during the confrontation with Ecuador at the opening of the World Cup, which
the coach considered the main reason for the loss.
While Sanchez admitted that the Qatari team was late in
entering the atmosphere of the previous confrontation, he expressed great
confidence in the players' ability to benefit from the great lesson they
learned from the match, in order to completely change the picture in the Friday
meeting against the strong Senegalese team, pointing out that Al-Adam is able
to perform better than the one he made in his first appearance in the World
Cup.
The beginning of the
technical work will be since the second half, in which the Qatari team showed a
noticeable improvement in performance, without changing the result, as it
needed efficiency and offensive effectiveness that it clearly lacked, and this
is what has been worked on during the training sessions since Monday.
The coach may resort to making adjustments, especially to
the playing system that he chose in the first match, and it did not bear fruit,
as the Qatari team is likely to return to playing with four defenders, with the
need for changes in the formation level in some positions, especially in the
area of operations, to increase efficiency and invest in the speed of
transitions. Which has always been a weapon that Al-Adam used to record a strong
presence, as he did in the 2019 AFC Asian Cup when he was crowned the title,
and he repeated the same thing in the CONCACAF Gold Cup, which reached the
semi-finals.
The confrontation
will be decisive for the Senegalese team and its stars, who, like the Qatari
team, want to compensate for the disappointment of the start by achieving a
victory that restores all the chances of the competition to qualify for the
second round, especially in light of the precedence of the Ecuadorian team
before its last confrontation in the group.
Aliou Cisse, coach of the Senegalese national team, had
confirmed that the loss against the Netherlands would make it difficult to face
the Qatari team, in light of entering the match with the demand for a joint
victory between the two teams to maintain hopes of passing the group stage.
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