Brief analysis of the game: Saudi Arabia vs. Czech Republic

Saudi Arabia, for the first time, showed some great performance and improvement as the World Cup nears in the game against Czech Republic. Even though they lost 2-0 against the Czechs, the players are satisfied of the game. The Czech scored the second goal through a penalty kick in the last few seconds. From the video, it doesn’t seem that Ahmed Al Dhoki pushed the player, but it doesn’t matter as it was only a friendly game.

The game reassures us that Paqueta is giving a strong touch to the team and hopefully will keep to his word of having the team ready before the World Cup.

There is still some room for improvement. The first and second goal is a result of the defender’s mistake. In addition the team needs to work on scoring goal. Yasser Al Qahtani needs to pass the ball more and others need to assist the forward player.

Unlike other friendly games, Saudi Arabia stood firm in the first few minutes of the game with 4-5-1 formation. Yasser Al Qahtani was assisted by the three midfielders Muhamad Noor, Nawad Al Temyat and Saud Khariri.

This is the first time Muhammad Khojah played as a goalkeeper for the World Cup team. Like many of you who watched the game, you probably impressed by the goalkeeper. I was impressed. He is one of the stars of the game, as he protected his goal firmly. In the second half he blocked a cross when he realized that there was no defender to protect him and basically went forward and stopped the ball in reaching to a Czech player.

On the 31st minute, Saud Khariri gave away the best opportunity to score. He was on route to score, but the only last barrier – the goalkeeper, stopped his ball. In that play, we saw some good passes within the player which helped Saud Khariri break the defense. If the team keeps up the effort of passing, we will be on our way to the second round.

The Czechs are a good team. Therefore, they kept posing a great threat to the Saudi goal. With some luck and effort from the Saudi players, the team achieved to keep the score 1-0 till the last few minutes. This game will be a moral boost to the player especially after withstanding a team ranked second by FIFA. The players are much relieved now that they can feel confident in being able to beat lower ranking teams than Czech Republic -Tunisia, Ukraine and Spain.