ABU DHABI // Despite a storm of his own creation, the UAE coach Rashid Amir appeared in more relaxed form yesterday ahead of a win-or-bust game on Wednesday.
The coach yesterday attempted to downplay the controversy he started after their team’s defeat on Sunday.
After a 6-1 loss to Brazil at the Mohammed bin Zayed Stadium that put them on the verge of elimination, Amir angrily claimed “70 per cent” of Brazil’s players at the Fifa Under 17 World Cup were overage.
He backed down from that assertion ahead of the UAE’s game tonight against Slovakia, attributing his outburst to “a moment of anger” after a comprehensive loss.
Fifa and Brazil’s coach both refuted his claim and Amir said he had already “apologised”. It was an understandable climbdown, given the gravity of the situation the hosts are facing.
With two losses and no points, not only do they need to win, they need results in other groups to fall their way so that they can qualify as one of the four best third-place finishers. They will not find out if they have made the last 16 until the group stage is completed on Friday.
In that sense, the game is not so much do or die, as do or die and hope. In hindsight, the moment that truly cost the UAE was the red card issued to Sultan Al Shamsi in the opening-night loss to Honduras. Before the tournament, that game could reasonably have been expected to yield three points.
But Amir mixed hope with pragmatism as he assessed his side’s chances.
“It’s 50-50 in the sense that it depends on our result as well as other teams’ results in other groups,” he said. “But the main thing is to focus on winning ourselves. As long as there are matches left and points to be taken, there is hope.”
As well as being forced to play with 10 players in the first game, the UAE have had a difficult time coping with injuries to their squad. They lost the midfielder Ali Ghuloum before the tournament began and have since suffered two more injuries, including Abdullah Al Hammadi during the Brazil loss.
But Amir is confident the rest of his squad can make up for the absences. “I have 21 fully prepared players to stand in each other’s place if needed and I have great trust in each of them,” he said. “We have been unlucky. In the first game we had a red card and an injury, then Al Hammadi got injured, but hopefully we can be ready for the next game. This is football, it happens.”
Despite beating Slovakia 3-1 in a friendly a couple of months ago, a result tonight is far from guaranteed. Slovakia were similarly thumped 6-1 by Brazil, but they were the better side in the 2-2 draw with Honduras. If anything, with a point already, they are better-positioned to sneak through in third place should they win.
There are no Slovakia injury concerns, though defender Attila Varga – on Juventus’ books – will miss the game after picking up two bookings. Coach Ladislav Pecko said his side will be wary of the swift counter-attacks that laid the platform for the UAE’s friendly win in Turkey.
“We have to take care and not be naive [like we were before],” Pecko said.
“The UAE scored in that friendly match against us after fast counter-attacks, so we have to take care of that. We don’t look at what other teams will do, we want three points. Anything else is fate. We will see if four points are enough to qualify, what has to happen after that will happen.”
osamiuddin@thenational.ae
8pm, Al Jazeera Sport HD4
