Just A Few Things: UAE Vs. Malaysia

Where’s The Aggression?

A game is played for 90 minutes. When there is a match there was so much to play, you have to give it all you got! But that is not what we did here. We were pedestrian for a chunk of the match and it was made worse when you consider UAE also didn’t put their foot on the gas pedal for all 90 minutes. Ultimately, they didn’t need to. There was no direction whatsoever from us whenever we tried to go forward.

The moment Syafiq Ahmad was brought in on 54 minutes, the team looked much better with the striker’s energetic pressing. But it was still not enough. Another aspect missing is Brendan Gan, who was suspended for this match. His spirit was sorely missed, especially in that midfield. If he’s gone, then where would that spirit come from? Where was that same passion where we went down with a fight against the same opponents two years ago? Heck, can we even get it back in time against Vietnam on the 11th?

Even so, imagine if we did have that aggression for the entire 90 minutes. It could’ve been a different story, especially when we had a good share of possession where we could’ve caught the UAE off guard. But in the end, the UAE rightly punished us for the lacklustre performance. We can be fortunate that our love-hate neighbours Indonesia did us a favour by holding Thailand 2-2 at the same time and in the process, keeping the group tight. But we cannot afford to be this bad in our final two matches.

It Was Just All Wrong

There’s a lot to unpack from this match from our perspective. So let’s start with the biggest elephant in the room. At full-time when Astro Arena host Hafizal Hamad asked “Is De Paula even in this team?”, the short pause between pundits Shukor Adan & Nidzam Jamil afterwards was deafening.

There wasn’t even anything positive from Guilherme De Paula’s performance. His awful free header just before half-time that went nowhere near towards goal epitomized his poor performance where there was almost no effort from him. The striker was basically a passenger that looked heavy enough to stop the car from even going. How he stayed on for the entire 90 minutes is anyone’s guess. If you’re gonna drop deep to keep the possession going, you’re going to need to put in a lot more effort than that. If you’re not, just stay up the pitch and let someone else drop deep like how Syafiq did. Overall, not a great night for him.

Meanwhile, Liridon Krasniqi failed to replicate his good first impression from the Bahrain match. He failed to dictate the tempo in an awful midfield performance by him, Nor Azam Azih and Syamer Kutty Abba. The midfield was bad to the point where Safawi Rasid and Mohamadou Sumareh, two other players who also had another bad night in attack, had to drop deep to offer protection to UAE’s scary attackers since we don’t have a pure defensive midfielder to shield our defence It was to the point where it was easy for UAE to make short passes to their attackers in the middle of the pitch.

For all the good work he has done for the national team, Tan Cheng Hoe (TCH) also has to take the blame here for not only failing to take off some of the players that, to be honest, dragged us down but also failing to instruct to press from the front where we played such a high defensive line early on in the match. That was how Ali Mabkhout opened the scoring by taking advantage of that. TCH has to hammer into the players’ heads, especially the ones who let everyone down, about how high the stakes are going into the next match.

Cool As You Like

There are only a few positives we can take from this game. One of them happens to be the newest addition to the Harimau Malaya setup. Despite joining the team late and given a short amount of time to adapt, Dion Cools had a decent debut despite playing out of position as Aidil Zafuan’s centre-back partner.

Cools is assigned as the ball-playing defender, making the incisive passes to the midfield. He even bravely took the ball forward and even attempted a few dribbles in order to contribute to the attack. On the defensive side, he was able to stay focused and even did well to follow Ali Mabkhout’s attempted runs into our final third.

Cools was then granted Malaysia’s best chance of all the 90 minutes when he saw his header at point-blank excellently saved by the UAE keeper Ali Khasif in the final minute. Cools made a great first impression, but he was let down by some of his teammates’ poor performance. Now, imagine if he did play in his natural position at right-back.

Farizal To The Rescue

However, it’s way too obvious who is the man-of-the-match for the Harimau Malaya on this night. If it weren’t for Farizal Marlias, the night could’ve been a lot worse. UAE had a number of chances to put the result beyond doubt much earlier before our limp collapse in the final 10 minutes.

Mabkhout and Fabio Lima, both of whom scored a brace in this match, had chances to double the lead much earlier, but Farizal pulled off amazing saves to keep the score down.
Farizal read almost every situation well with calmness and did his best to stop the UAE from scoring more. Alas, there was nothing he could do to stop Fabio’s amazing finish in 83 minutes and an awful collapse into injury time saw him concede two more despite his best effort to stop them. For all his great work, he is also let down by some of his teammates.

Apa Lagi?

Well, we were told about how dangerous Ali Mabkhout and Fabio Lima are. We were already warned about them prior to the match and the Harimau Malaya failed to deal with them effectively. The fact there was so much space between the central defenders for Mabkhout to run and receive the long ball to score the opener was criminal while Fabio showed his class by scoring an amazing curler from an angle in the 83rd minute. These two players showed why they are so threatening.

La’vere Corbin-Ong did well with his defensive duties, using his physicality to keep the winger on his side quiet and didn’t give him space to breathe while also running down on the left wing. Matt Davies is another hard worker looking to attack down the right, continuing his form from the Bahrain match. Aidil Zafuan did the best he could, Syafiq Ahmad showed why he surely needs to start with his energy that was desperately needed in the team and Luqman Hakim makes his first international senior debut, but sadly didn’t contribute much offensively because he had to drop deep a lot to keep the play going.

All in all, the sooner we can move on from this awful loss, the better. Because there is no point dwelling in it. All we can hope is that TCH gets the players to buck up.

THIS ARTICLE IS POWERED BY CYBERLYNX INTERNATIONAL COLLEGE: EDUCATION FOR THE NEW MILLENNIUM