Day brings focus on finishing
After returning from England just the day before, Bangladesh head coach Jamie Day yesterday conducted the national football team’s training session, where focus was placed on goal scoring skills, just six days ahead of their Bangabandhu Gold Cup opener against Palestine.
Finishing has always been a concern for the national team, as evinced by their disappointing campaign in the recently concluded South Asian Games in Nepal.
“We have a fairly solid defence. Obviously, the issue is scoring goals so we need to work on that and how to get the boys into good areas from where they could try to score. It’s going to be a problem and it’s not going change soon but we need to do some work on that. That’s what we are going to do for the next 4-5 days,” said Day.
During yesterday’s training at the Birshreshtha Shaheed Mostafa Kamal Stadium, the players were made to practice attacking, getting into the box and fast breaks on counters.
“We are focusing on the attacking phase of players for next couple of days. If we want to reach the semis and final, we have to win games and to do that, we have to score goals,” said the 40-year-old coach.
However, Day still believes that fatigue is a concern even though the players’ fitness is adequate at the moment.
“Fitness is not a problem because they played the Federation Cup. The main concern for us is fatigue but the boys trained well today. Those who got knocked out of the competition [Federation Cup] earlier had more rest than the players of Bashundhara Kings. We just monitor the Kings players for now but they are from a good club with a good coach who knows how to look after players. Hopefully they will be in near fit condition before the Palestine game,” explained Day.
Day also believes that the match against Palestine will be a good test for the players, who played against the same opposition during the last edition of the Gold Cup, when they lost 2-0 in the semifinals.
“We played Palestine in the semifinals last year, so we know it’s going to be a tough game. We are looking at it as test for the players. If we can beat Palestine, it will be great and if we can’t do it, we move onto Sri Lanka and try to win that game,” said Day, adding that their primary target surmount the group stage first.
“We need to be positive and confident going into the Bangabandhu Gold Cup. It’s going to be tough, so everyone should be in a good frame of mind and ready to go,” continued Jamie, who believes the African teams are going to be hard to beat.
“African teams are going to be big and strong physically and they are going to be tough to beat but again, it’s a new challenge for the players to play against different oppositions. Hopefully we will get into the semifinal and play one of them.”
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