Rayan Hameed, Haitham Asiri and a brace from Aiman Yahya secured the defending champions a 4-2 win over Tajikistan with Al Shehri adamant that the best is yet to come from the West Asian side.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe first game, as always, is difficult but it\u2019s a good result for us,\u201d said Al Shehri. \u201cOur performance was good. We made some mistakes but we will correct this in the coming matches.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur goal coming here was to qualify for the final. But in this kind of competition, we have to take it step by step.\u201d<\/p>\n
Having gone through their title-winning campaign in 2022 without conceding a single goal, it came as a surprise that Tajikistan were able to twice breach the Saudi Arabia backline, with Al Shehri admitting he will work on this ahead of their remaining matches in Group C against Thailand and Iraq.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe didn\u2019t want to concede. We cannot be satisfied with it. They were easy goals and we could have won without conceding. For sure, we need to work a little bit more in this area. <\/p>\n
\u201cYes, we scored four but we also want to keep clean sheets but the first game in a tournament can sometimes be a bit jittery.\u201d<\/p>\n
Tajikistan showed fighting spirit to first draw level at 1-1 through Ruslan Khailoev before Rustam Soirov scored the second as they heaped the pressure on Saudi Arabia late on.<\/p>\n
However, having been outdone by three counter attacking moves that saw his defence in sixes and sevens, head coach Mubin Ergashev had regrets that his plansdid not come to fruition.<\/p>\n
\u201cCongratulations to the Saudi Arabia national team for the win,\u201d said Ergashev. \u201cThey are a very good team that are well-balanced in each line. <\/p>\n
\u201cThe gap between our defence and midfield was very big and the opponent used this distance and scored their goals. <\/p>\n
\u201cUnfortunately, the plans that we devised in training weren’t used fully by the players, who also did not completely follow the instructions that we\u2019ve given them.\u201d<\/p>\n
Saudi Arabia will take on Thailand on Friday with Tajikistan to face Iraq.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Rayan Hameed, Haitham Asiri and a brace from Aiman Yahya secured the defending champions a 4-2 win over Tajikistan with Al Shehri adamant that the best is yet to come from the West Asian side. \u201cThe first game, as always, is difficult but it\u2019s a good result for us,\u201d said Al Shehri. \u201cOur performance was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":967633,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20967],"tags":[3733,28042],"class_list":["post-967632","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-afc-news","tag-afc","tag-afc-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/91varzeshi.ir\/portal\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/967632","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/91varzeshi.ir\/portal\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/91varzeshi.ir\/portal\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/91varzeshi.ir\/portal\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/91varzeshi.ir\/portal\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=967632"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/91varzeshi.ir\/portal\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/967632\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/91varzeshi.ir\/portal\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/967633"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/91varzeshi.ir\/portal\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=967632"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/91varzeshi.ir\/portal\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=967632"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/91varzeshi.ir\/portal\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=967632"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}