Heavy Defeats for Our Team in Qatar A Tragedy [Archives:1998/35/Sports]

archive
August 31 1998

Sports in Yemen has spoken… during Asia’s Football Tournament in Qatar. In his last match against Qatar, the Yemeni team was horribly defeated 8-1. Our players totally gave up after Qatar’s first goal at the 18th second of the first half of the match. The other 7 goals followed very easily.
This is not strange. We have been always like this and we almost got used to defeats. The Qatari players played with a very high self-confidence and showed good personal skills. They secured 4 goals during the first half of the match and 4 goals during the second. In sharp contrast, the Yemeni players did not do anything, neither attacking nor defending. It was quite clear that the players did not go through any serious training program and they are not physically qualified to play.
Not only defeats, but the Yemeni team came out with 3 red cards, 1 red card of each match they played. The first red card was for Hani Abdulrahman during the match with Bahrain, in which Yemen was defeated 1-nil. The second red card was for Ibrahim Awad during our match with Iran in which we were defeated 1-4. And the third red card was for Basil Awad during our last match with Qatar.
Thus, our team comes out with heavy defeats and bad performance.
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