Baghdad-WAA
Our national football team continued its daily training sessions in the Qatari capital, Doha, as part of its external camp currently being held there, which will continue until the second of next September, in preparation for the first and second rounds of the qualifiers for the 2026 World Cup against Oman and Kuwait in Group Two.
The correspondent of the (INA) reported that “Qatar University Stadium hosted the second unit, and the exercises took place in the evening in a hot atmosphere characterized by high humidity. The players were equipped by the medical staff with many salts and nutritional supplements to compensate for the lost fluids. This was preceded by analysis sessions between the training staff, and the exercises of the day before yesterday were presented in order to review the performance, identify errors, improve tactical understanding and stop at the players’ responses that can be modified or added to, based on the team’s technical needs that are consistent with the training objectives during this preparatory camp.”
“Yesterday’s exercises included many different tactical elements, starting with warm-up movements to prepare the players’ muscles for physical activity and prevent them from injuries, such as light jogging, stretching exercises and dynamic movements, which were later mixed with technical skills training to improve ball control, passing and dribbling, followed by consolidating the duties of the positions to improve team play and understanding roles, movements without the ball, playing in small squares, then moving to free or restricted play, whether in full division or half-court, which is part of the Spanish coach’s tactics for the matches against Oman in Basra and Kuwait in his stadium early next month,” he added.
“Coach Casas is well aware that his team is the most stable in his World Cup group, which gives him a lot of confidence and technical stability during the first match against his Omani counterpart, who replaced his former Croatian coach Branko Ivanovic last February with the current Czech Jarek Silhavy, noting that the Lions of Mesopotamia battalion faced Oman twice during the Basra Gulf Championship in 2023, but with the visions of the former Branko, which is characterized by tight defensive organization and balanced pressure in specific areas, and quality in quick transitions, in addition to focusing on team play and exploiting set pieces to achieve goals, while the philosophy of the current coach Silhavy differs greatly from his predecessor, as the former tends to an indirect style of play, i.e. possession of the ball and rotation under a balanced system between defense and attack, in addition to advanced pressure in the opponent’s field to reduce the spaces that the opponent can exploit, and he also has various patterns in offensive tactics in the final third, which are points that seem clear to our national team coach and his assistant staff, to develop ideal scenarios to decide the first World Cup confrontation.”