An embarrassing step to 'avert humiliation'
Due to fear of being humiliated by stronger opponents, the Bangladesh Football Federation is mulling whether they should refrain from sending the winning squad of the SAFF U-15 Championship to Thailand for a four-nation football tournament.
During a reception for the SAFF U-15 Champions on November 5 where BFF president Kazi Salahuddin was present, the game's local body had declared that they would send the Bangladesh squad to the U-15 tournament -- also involving Cyprus, Thailand and Maldives -- in December in order to groom the boys. They also pledged to provide long-term training at the Sylhet BKSP.
Nearly two weeks since that announcement, the boys have still not been sent to Sylhet but instead have been training in Dhaka.
Now, another bad news for the boys is that they are likely to lose a chance to test themselves against good teams in a better tournament than the SAFF U-15 Championship.
Interestingly, BFF technical and strategic director Paul Smalley advised the game's governing body not to send the team to Thailand in a bid to 'avert humiliating results'.
"We haven't taken a final decision yet. Smalley will discuss the matter with the president [Salahuddin] and national coach Jamie Day tomorrow [Sunday] and take the final decision," said BFF general secretary Abu Nayeem Shohag.
"Smalley is not convinced that Bangladesh can produce good results; rather [he believes] they will lose humiliatingly. So he warned us about that," said Shohag.
"We are in a respectable position after winning the SAFF Championship. We can go to a lot of other such competitions if we want to spend money to participate. At the moment, our initiative is to provide proper preparation before sending the team abroad," Shohag concluded.
It was learnt that Smalley was not interested in sending the team to Thailand without proper preparation; but he seems to have forgotten that Bangladesh retained the SAFF U-15 Championship title on November 3 on the back of two months of preparation.
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