Saudi Arabia

[zzgloo]

After the game.......
We have realized....the Saudi's are indeed a very good team....
Thier defense was much better than before...and handled our attacks with ease.......
thier midfiled, took care of Iran's midfield, ( One of asia'a bests ).
thier offense, while was missing thier top two players...maleek, and Alghahtani...was very fast and strong.......
thier coaching, seems to be as inexperinced as ours...and could not come up with the right answer in the secound half.
Our home return game against them , will be tough as well !

[Hadi]

yeah Saudi is a very good team.

They are much less physical than they used to be and have fitness issues. But they have become a very fast team with dangerous strikers.

[Ali Chicago]

This is my view of KSA team. I posted it in the post match discussion too, but didnt' seem to get much traction. Would like to hear other F+ members comments.

These are the great things KSA team did and I hope our coaching staff keep track of it IMO(which I am sure they are).


Getting to the second ball (ball rebounded by our defnse) behind our box, KSA mids Ateef, Alshaloob specially were very good. On the contrary our mids were too far from KSA goal and almost stuck to our defense line. Look at the picture of the first goal people posted for the first goal.

Closing the space to our player. Any of our players got the ball 2-3 KSA players surronding him. Shojaii had the technique to dribble around (rather ineffectively if u ask me) but rest of our team was turning the ball over.

Moving to the spaces between our players. Quick one touch passes for the counter attack. In the scene that Gholamnezahd attacked on the right and lost the ball next to the corner flag of KSA and they counter attacked, under 10secs they were attacking our goal. Still no Gholamnezhad has comeback and KSA player stole the ball off the Nekoo and created a second chance.

Ben Sultan and Alharthi did a great job to check back, get a one touch pass, but by doing this, pull our defenders that was marking them off the front of the goal.

They spread the ball well until the 60th minute. It seemed after that, they got tired or maybe our team played much better.

Alshaloob (number 10) and Ben Sultan 7, made deep runs with the ball and constantly moving without the ball (see KSA first goal and movement of Ben Sultan on the overlap that in part distracted Nekoo from Marking 11 Alharthi. Both 10 and 7 did a great job to do lateral runs and place themselves in the spaces across our defnes (spaces between LB and RB and two CB repectively).