Ferreira: Al-Gharafa is an organized team; Khalfan won’t play

Al-Sadd head coach Jesualdo Ferreira has spoken of the difficulty of the upcoming game against Al-Gharafa in Round 5 of the Qatar Stars League, which will be played on Saturday at the Thani bin Jassim Stadium.

Speaking at the pre-match press conference, Ferreira said: “Al-Gharafa are a strong and organized team regardless of their recent results. We saw many of their matches and their performance was very different from the result. For me, they have players of a high calibre and are a very organized team. We must be in our best conditions in order to get the win and the three points.”

He added: “This is a very difficult match. Everyone knows that we faced Al-Gharafa twice during my time with Al-Sadd last season and we did not win easily. We need to improve our level and perform better than we did in our last four matches in order to win.”

Ferreira also spoke of how he trained many big coaches in a coach training academy, saying: “I taught a lot of big coaches like Iran coach Queiroz and then Al-Gharafa’s Caixinha and there is also Mourinho. We used to work on a footballing principle in Portugal. But Caixinha works as he learnt in Portugal and not as how I taught him in the academy.”

As for the goals which Al-Sadd conceded in the last match, Ferreira said: “When you speak of the goals we conceded, you must also speak of the goals we scored. We need to observe that the team played 4 official matches in three months and this is too little. At the start of the second half against Muaither, we conceded goals and that is because of the fatigue of our international players due to their repeated participation with the national teams.”

“We are working on finding a balance between defence and attack and the Al-Gharafa match will show that and will also show the improvement in the level of the team from one match to the other,” said Ferreira at the end of the conference, while adding that Khalfan Ibrahim will not the play in the match due to injury.