Having spent a four-day Eid vacation, footballers and coaching staff wasted no more time to start preparation for June’s World Cup Qualifiers at the Bangabandhu National Stadium yesterday even as they did not receive Covid-19 test results till afternoon after undergoing tests on Sunday.
In a quest to coping up with the hot weather in Doha, the booters sweated out under the sun for more than an hour on the first day of training after coach Jamie Day conducted a yoyo fitness test of all 32 players, with majority of them achieving the target.
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“The players look very good in training because they spent some time with their family and friends. They did very well in the first session today and I hope they will look sharper in the next three to four days,” said the 41-year-old coach, who believes Bangladesh will have to give their best to get some points in the remaining three matches against Afghanistan, India and Oman.
“Obviously we will try to win all three games and we need to play extremely well to do that because we are going to play against teams who are ranked higher than us. We know if we don’t play our best, we can’t win. We discussed it yesterday [Sunday] and will discuss it in the next couple of weeks, so that we can play our best to get some points,” said Day.
“If everyone doesn’t play 10 in 10, we can’t win. If they can play six or seven, we might draw and if they play less than six or seven, then we stay where we have been. It is very hard to win matches in Qatar but we will try to get points as much as we can though we know that we have lost our home advantage and the situation is extremely hard but we are looking forward to the three matches.”
Midfielder Manik Molllah is confident of doing something well in Qatar.
“The fitness of the players is at a good level. So we have an opportunity to do something good if we can capitalise on the training properly because we have some time in hand before the start of the Qualifiers,” the Chattogram Abahani midfielder said. “Doing training in hot weather here will help us cope up with the weather in Qatar.”
The initial plan was to keep all the players at hotel during the Eid break, but the Bangladesh Football Federation allowed the players to spend time with family members before resuming the camp on Sunday.
However, starting training without getting test results has apparently triggered health risk to all the players, a situation similar to August last year when 18 players had tested positive.
