Sailiya coach Saml Trabelsi

By Sports Reporter/Doha

Lacklustre Al Sailiya will face stuttering Al Gharafa in one of the three Qatar Stars League matches taking place today. In the other two matches, Al Khor will take on in-form Qatar SC and Umm Salal will look to get back to winning ways against Al Kharaitiyat.
But the focus will be on the match between Sailiya and Gharafa. Sailiya were one of the stand-out teams last year, with their coach Sami Trabelsi winning the ‘Coach of the Year’ award for guiding his team to a commendable fourth position on the table. But this year they haven’t been able to replicate that form. One of the many reasons is that they have lost their key players and haven’t found able replacements.
On the other side is Gharafa who are going through a horrid patch, having lost five matches in a row. Their coach Marcos Paquetá knows that his team is riding on the strong results in the first half of the season, which sees them currently in seventh place. But his team will have to find their rhythm and start winning games again if they are to achieve their goal of finishing in the top-4 this season.
Here’s what the coaches had to say during the pre-match press conference:

Al Sailiya head coach Sami Trabelsi:
“It will not be an easy game for us. Gharafa are coming from a string of defeats and they have also changed their foreign players. They will try to come back strongly in this game and get back to winning ways, especially because they had good results at the beginning of the season. Our ambition is to come back strongly too. Lin the last game we had a draw but we didn’t have a good performance. Hopefully the next game we will be more ready and we will take the three points. We will have to play with more concentration that’s for sure.”
“I am not happy with the team’s performance after we came back from the break. We should have won the game against Qatar SC. The problem for us is that we are losing matches towards the end of the game. We end up conceding a goal in the dying minutes. We are making too many mistakes towards the end of the game and we are working on those aspects and hoping to resolve them. We are hoping to get a couple of wins under our belt because when we move up the table, the players will have more confidence and our team will play better. As a team we are looking to do much better in this period of the League than we did in the first half.”
“As for Gharafa, I don’t know why they are not doing well. Maybe the players that have come in now will give them more opportunities during matches. But I think that it’s a problem about confidence more than anything else. They have a lot of good players - Qatari and international. So, the problem is not technical but mostly to do with confidence.”
 
Al Gharafa head coach Marcos Paquetá:
“The next game is an opportunity for the team to change direction. No coach wants to be in this situation with so many defeats. But I want to tell you that in the five defeats that we have had recently, we were better than our opponent and we didn’t deserve to lose. But we are still close to the top-4 and we still have the possibility to reach our target. We are analyzing the situation and we will fight back. And this is the time for us to bring about the change. Bringing in new players is a positive thing for the team.”
“Sailiya is a good team with good players. They try to pressurize their opposition with long balls and they have players with good individual quality. But we are ready for this game because this is the opportunity to get back in the hunt for a top-4 finish.”
“We lost many chances during the past 2 to 3 games. The players are getting good chances but they are not able to convert them. They are lacking confidence.”
“As for the new players, the first thing is that they have to adapt. It’s not easy when you start playing with a new team. They have to play together to understand the players and have good coordination. Today we have received a new player, Claudio Keseru from Steau Bucharest and it’s good for us because he is a striker. We need a player who can convert from the box.
We are hoping that this is the game where we cross over from a bad string of results to getting back on track and into the top four.”