Praise be to Allah; we won our first game against Guam in the joint World Cup and Asian Cup qualification. Once again, we hear our coach speak after the game. While we appreciate what he is achieving for Maldivian football, he mustn’t be allowed to think we Maldivians are fools.

For those of us who watched the Guam match, we cant help but wonder what Dhagandey(Ali Ashfaq) would have done to their defense line. Ranked 190 in the world, Guam isn’t exactly the Brazil of the group. Again, if we watched the game, we can see that their stadium itself gives us an idea how big a footballing nation Guam is. Maldives is ranked at 152 by the way!

We saw some very poor performances against teams in the Indian Ocean Island games. Why? It resulted in many saying we are wasting money on football when other sports did well. Segrt went on to give excuses. The plain truth is we didn’t send our best team. Against Guam for me captain Aku(‘sAkram Abdul Ghani) experience helped. For sure if we used the same defense line that we had in IOIG we wouldn’t have taken three points. Aku’s calmness and organization was extremely important.

We have also seen raise to another teenager Nazeem(Choatu). My question is was Nazeem used as another ego move by Segrt? I can’t help but wonder what was the need of Segrt to say he played with a 17-year-old after the Guam game, would someone tell Segrt Nazeem is 18 not 17. Lucky for us Choatu did well. But this is the kind of stunt Segrt pulls. Abdulla Yameen of Green Streets was used last year to break Maldives all time national team record. Segrt wanted the record. Yameen is a great player. He is a much better player now than he was last year, but now Segrt is done using his age factor. The people of Maldives are not fools and we hope this is not repeated with Nazeem.

This brings me to another conclusion that Petar Segrt does not care about the results. He keeps playing us the people of Maldives. Firstly he said we are going to the world cup. Then he uses these kinda stunts to buy himself time. If he did care about the results he would take the best squad not the future squad, because at senior levels we demand results. IOIG has tarnished the image of football in the country and it is because Segrt believes in the future of Maldives football. My question is, is he here to improve for the future or is he here to get results right now!

This is true of most of our national teams, our coaches always have a way with words fooling people talking about future competitions. I think that is the FA’s job, the coaches should focus on their teams. And no don’t say that previously no good coaching is provided. We all know that that’s called buying time.

It's time to leave everything behind us and focus on China. We have drawn South Korea at home. They were FIFA World Cup semi finalists then. We can only hope.

From:Dhivehseh (via Facebook Messenger)

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