Saudi Arabia will be facing some familiar opposition at the FIFA Arab Cup in December but the Green Falcons are being tipped to return to Qatar in 2022 by a coach who knows them better than most.
“I think Saudi Arabia will qualify for the World Cup as they are a good team with a very good coach,” said Noureddine Ould Ali, who led Palestine for three years from April 2018 to April 2021. “And the important thing to remember is that the team are improving and progressing.”
Ould Ali’s last match in charge of Palestine was a 5-0 thrashing at the hands of Saudi Arabia in a March World Cup qualifier held in Riyadh. It was a disappointing result for the Algerian coach, especially as he had engineered a 0-0 draw against the three-time Asian champions earlier in the group stage.
“The game in March was a difficult game for us,” Ould Ali added. “We were not able to get our best players from elsewhere in the region and our European players could not come because they would have had to quarantine when they returned to their clubs. So I could take only local players and there were also some injuries.”
He is not making excuses, however. “Saudi Arabia were better than us, they are a great team with big players and they were just too good for us.”
One difference between the two meetings 18 months apart was the time Herve Renard had spent with his squad. The Frenchman was in charge of Saudi Arabia in the first game, but this was early in his tenure, before he could impart his ideas on the players.
“At the time, he didn’t know much about the team’s style of football or his players but he needed time. Soon he started to understand the country, his players and how to achieve his project there, and now there are positive results,” said Oud Ali. “You can see that in the way they play and they move the ball around better, the movement is good and the players are comfortable and know their jobs.”
Suffice to say that Ould Ali is a fan of the 52-year-old Renard, who took Morocco to the 2018 World Cup finals and Zambia and Ivory Coast to the African Cup of Nations titles in 2012 and 2015 respectively.
“Renard is a very good coach, you can just look at what he has done. He has won two African cups with two different countries, which is very difficult to do, and he will be successful with Saudi Arabia. The team is full of very technical players with good attackers like Salem Al-Dawsari and Abdullah Otayf who can bring the ball out of defence and turn it into an attack very well.”
For Saudi Arabia’s players, the FIFA Arab Cup, is a great chance to keep sharp during the World Cup qualification campaign. While the World Cup will bring meetings with unfamiliar opposition, that is not the case this December, when they face Morocco, Palestine and Jordan in Group C. With Renard in charge of Morocco from 2016 to 2019, the North Africans should hold few surprises and Palestine and Jordan, who crashed out of World Cup qualification after a disappointing second round performance, are not unfamiliar either.
“Jordan has good players and I don’t know what happened to them in qualification,” said Ould Ali, who is considering a number of offers from Europe. “They stopped their league for a while and that does have consequences. They had a training camp in the United Arab Emirates but training is not a substitute for games and maybe that was the problem. They will be strong opposition in December, however.”
And so should Palestine, temporarily led by Ould Ali’s former assistant Makram Daboub.
“The issue for Palestine is always preparation,” he said. “The motivation is there and the players are there and if they have a good preparation for the Arab Cup then they can get good results against these teams but it depends on whether they can get their best players together and for how long.”
Palestine qualified for the 16-team tournament that will kick off on Dec. 1 with a 5-1 thrashing of Comoros on Thursday. They were joined by Sudan, who defeated Libya, and Oman, who squeezed past Somalia. With South Sudan unable to play due to a COVID-19 outbreak, Jordan went through, as did Mauritania who defeated Yemen 2-0.
Lebanon defeated Djibouti 1-0, while the biggest clash in qualifying was the Friday night meeting between Bahrain and Kuwait, two teams that failed to make it to the third round of qualification for the World Cup. Bahrain ran out 2-0 winners and will join an-all Asian group along with hosts Qatar, Oman and Iraq.
