File picture of Sadd coach Hussein Amotta.
By Sports Reporter/Doha
Round 21 of the Qatar Stars League kicks off today with Al Sadd taking on Al Sailiya, table toppers Lekhwiya facing Al Wakrah and El Jaish playing Al Khor.
Below are extracts from the pre-match press conferences.
Al Sailiya vs Al Sadd
Jassim bin Hamad stadium
Al Sailiya head coach Sami Trabelsi
“We haven’t had a lot of time to prepare. We have worked only on recovering our fitness. Sadd is a team with titles and victories. They have good quality - individual and collective. And they have players with lots of experience. We will try to do our best and take three points.”
“It’s not that difficult to play against a team like Sadd. The reality is on the field. We know that Sadd have good players who push you to respect them. But we will play our football with fighting spirit and the better team will win this game and I hope that it will be us.”
“Of course they have to win this match if they want to compete for the title. But with just six games left, it will be difficult for them. We will try to do our best and play with total concentration because in these kinds of games, you can lose focus for just a few moments and end up losing.”
“Until the 15th game this season, we were at the same level of points like last season. But after that we had a string of bad results. We are not thinking about the last season. But I think we are affected, like 2-3 other teams, by the decision to restrict the foreign players to three. Because, we as a team, don’t have many choices when it comes to players. And we needed this fourth player to play. We started missing players in a few key positions like left-back for example. That affected us and that was the reason behind our bad results. Maybe we had a bad start to this season, but in some of those matches, we didn’t deserve to lose.”
Al Sadd head coach Hussein Amotta
“Of course we still have a chance to win the title. We need to win all the games in order to stay close to the leaders. We had bad results in our previous two games. So we need to make sure we don’t repeat it in our third game. This is our 10th game in one month. That is an overload for our players. The schedule didn’t help us.”
“Sailiya are a good team this season too. They had a good game, coming from victory against Shamal. For us, we need to work more on our fitness. We cannot ask our players more than what they are giving. They haven’t gotten enough time to recover. But I hope that we will be ready for this game.”
“The players on the bench are not at 100 per cent either. Some of them are coming from injuries and we have had absences for cards. Three important players were absent in the last game. And for this game, Ali Assad and Abdelkarim Hassan will be missing. Unfortunately this is our situation and the schedule isn’t helping us recover our players.”
“When you are playing to win the league, you cannot get one point and be happy. We have to play for three points. In the game before the last one, we lost three players. They are coming back but now we lost two players for this game. And I think it will be difficult for us. This is game no. 10 in 35 days. Even professional players in Europe don’t play these many games.”
“We have to focus on how we do on the field rather than looking at how Lekhwiya has done. That’s what is in our hands and that’s what we need to focus on.”
“We are not in second place because Lekhwiya played their games before us. But rather, it is simply because we missed our chances to win our games.”
“When you a coach Al Sadd, you are expected to win titles. I won the league title in my first year but we lost the Qatar Cup and the Emir Cup. Last season we lost the title but we won the Emir Cup and were the only team to be in the Asian Champions League. Now in the ACL we are first in our group. We are playing for the title in the league and we still have two other titles that we will play for. But that is normal for Sadd. I have played for Sadd and I know how it is. Even in the first game of the league, we will play with this pressure. We are used to it.”
Al Wakrah vs Lekhwiya
Saoud Bin Abdulrahman Stadium
Al Wakrah coach Goran Tufegdžić
“This match will be against a side with good individual players who will look to control the match. It will be difficult but that’s how football is and we have to deal with it. We have had only two days after our match against Arabi. The good news is that for the first time our team is complete. So we are looking to fight for each point from now on.”
“I think our players can play much better. The bad results have led to players losing their self-confidence. I am trying to give confidence back to the squad. I know Wakrah can play better and it will take probably just one point to get that confidence back.”
“There’s a lot of pressure on us right now. Our position is bad. We are getting better with each match and with just one good result our team can get out of the relegation zone.”
Lekhwiya coach Michael Laudrup
“We are playing matches now twice a week. There’s not enough time to even enjoy the fact that we won the last match.”
“I expect Wakrah to be well organised, they will fight for 90 minutes to get something positive because of they are in a very difficult situation right now.”
“We prepare for every game, looking to win and with our current schedule it is normal that some players are starting to look tired. We controlled the last game for 90 minutes and we won. Al Sadd and Lekhwiya are in the same situation, playing a lot of games in the next few weeks.”
“What we can say now after 20 games is that both Lekhwiya and Sadd have had a fantastic season so far. We are 14 points ahead of Jaish – who are in third, which is a real achievement.”
Al Khor vs El Jaish
Al Khor Stadium.
Khor coach Lásló Boloni
“We don’t have enough time to between matches. Luckily we don’t have problems with injuries. We have been pushing our players to play with more concentration during training because in two days we can’t work on tactics only on physical and mental conditioning.”
“The first half, against Gharafa we played our best football this season. But we were unable to profit from that. We we need to prove that we can deliver results.”
“To improve on Khor’s current situation, to move to the next step, we need two things. The first is that we need stability with the current lot of players which will give us results. The second is that we need some new blood. Not a lot of players because I know the capacity of Khor.“
“When you are coming from defeat, you will have a reaction. Football is like nature. You cut a flower and the plant will grow another one back. So we have to come back stronger without talking about reaction or something. It’s our life. That’s what we do.”
“Our ambition is to win all the remaining games. I cannot say that I want to win this game and not that one. I want to take the maximum from what I still have.”
Jaish head coach Sabri Lamouchi
“Al Khor are a very organised team. We too are coming from a defeat. But during that game we created a lot of chances but we didn’t score, sometimes football is like this.”
“The most difficult thing is to score. If you want to win you have to score. And on the other hand, if you don’t score not only do you not win but you could end up losing too - like we did in the last game.”
“In any game it is important to create many chances. We did that in our last game but unfortunately we didn’t score. We have to play with more aggression. We can’t play as though we are playing amongst friends. Qatar SC had a good defence and I didn’t think before the game that we would create so many chances. We did that but we couldn’t score because our finishing was bad.”
Player Lee Keun-ho
“Our result against Qatar SC was poor despite having had a good performance. Our players know the problems and know what they need to improve on. As time goes by, the results will keep getting better.”
“We are on our way to success. We have learnt a lot of things from our failure and hopefully we will have more wins as the season ends.”
Fixtures
Al Wakrah vs Lekhwiya 6:00pm
Al Khor vs El Jaish 8:15pm
Al Sailiya vs Al Sadd 8:15pm
