AFC Cup: Maziya lost again

Apr 01, 2014 - 07:58:48 | Shimaz Ali
Maziya's Abu in action against Arema today. Maziya lost the match by 3-2. (Photo: WSG)

Malang, INDONESIA – Maziya Sports and Recreation Club lost their second leg against Indonesia’s Arema today by 3-2. Cristian Gonzales struck the winning goal in stoppage time.

Arema’s Cristian Gonzales opened the scoring just after 25 minutes as Gonzales gave Maziya goalkeeper Mohamed Imran no chance with a downward header from the edge of the six-yard area.

A minute later Gustavo Lopez doubled the lead from an unstoppable strike from 25 yards.

Maziya's Amdhan scored a goal just two minutes after the hour mark and three minutes later, Abdulla Ibrahim leveled the game.

But with Gonzales heading home in the first minute of stoppage time, Arema claimed a second win against Maziya having beaten them 3-1 a fortnight ago in Male.

Maziya’s coach Ismail Mahfooz said that he is not happy with the result.

“I am not happy this result, but I am happy with how we played.”

“Arema played pretty well with the support of their fans,” said Maziya coach Ismail Mahfooz.

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morgan on Apr 02
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A lot of reasons can be attributed to Maziya’s poor performance in the AFC cup. Top most, in my view, is coach Imma’s tactics and his wayward training methods. His training drills don’t include any fitness enhancing exercise. I haven’t seen him engaging his players in the most essentials must do training drills Fitness Ladder, 150 yard high intensity shuttle, Pyramid Fartlek runs or Incremental Aerobic recovery runs which are solely for improving players’ endurance. Your performance in a football match depend a lot on what you do in the training session to improve your fitness, stamina, ball passing and how much that you translate it in the actual match. If the coach is not able to inspire you and his tactics are falling apart there is no point in persisting with him when his utility is outrun. Imma has his run and it is proving to be too much for him, at least in AFC cup, year after year. May be it is time Maziya do away with Imma and bring a new one with fresh ideas with good coaching skills. Preferably a foreigner.
Issey on Apr 02
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I wonder if there are actually any Maldivian coaches who are well-versed in fitness management. Most foreign clubs, typically the ones based in the bigger, popular leagues, have staffs who specifically deal with player fitness. In Maldives we simply don't have people of that calibre in our clubs. Our "training sessions" consist of players lining up to shoot the ball at the goal. I remember when Andres Cruciani (horrible coach, but that's not the point) brought in a fitness trainer to our national team back in 2011. The trainer expressed his shock at our stone age training methods and immediately set out to improve them. When Cruciani got sacked, FAM insisted that they wanted to keep the fitness trainer. I don't know what happened after that...Anyway, I think it is high time that our football paid more attention to honing young coaches. We harp on all the time about players needing to move abroad to improve our football. The problem is, most of our coaches used to spend their whole carriers here in Maldives, got comfortable with the lacklustre training methods and are now putting the modern generation of players through those mind-numbing routines. Our football needs a change in mentality, and for that to happen we need better coaches and like you said, fresh ideas.

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