Bangladesh look to shed past failure

Bangladesh will kick off their SAFF Championship campaign on Friday as they will take on Sri Lanka in the opening game of the tournament at Maldives.

Bangladesh come into the tournament as the second-lowest ranked team in the tournament at 189, with only Sri Lanka behind them at 205. Their recent form is also not promising as Bangladesh have lost all three of their most recent matches in the ‘Three Nations Cup’ in Kyrgyzstan.

Considering Bangladesh’s ranking, head coach Oscar Bruzon is not ready to tag Bangladesh as the favourites and said on Thursday that to think of playing the final is a dream as of today. He added that he wanted the team to play like one of the best teams in the world.

“I never said that our goal is to reach the final. If you look at the rankings, we are second-bottom in this tournament. So, talking about playing in the final today is a dream, not a reality.

“Tomorrow, we want to play our game and have a good opening day. We are going to stick to our style. We will try to get a win. We want to play like one of the top ten teams in the world, with full confidence and determination. And this is not just from me. It is the feeling we are getting from the players,” he said.

The Spaniard went on to add that India were the favourites and that they had the opportunity to show what kind of ideas they were trying to implement.

“We will have to find out effective ways to win the game. We will try to implement our new game ideas. We are at the service of the players; we are not asking the players to serve the system. We are adjusting to the players’ attributes, and we are confident that we can have a good championship.

“We are very cool, very calm. We have a strong sense of responsibility. We are determined that the boys are working in the right way. I want to take all these positive minds to effective implementation. It’s very difficult to prepare in one week, but it’s possible. Tomorrow we will have the first opportunity to show that we want to play in a different way,” Bruzon said.

Bangladesh skipper Jamal Bhuyan said that against Sri Lanka, they wanted to display a positive approach throughout the game.

“We will start the game in a positive way and play 90 minutes of positive football. I hope, and I think we can do very well against Sri Lanka.

The main goal is to get the three points tomorrow,” he said.

The Bangladesh captain also addressed the goalscoring problem that they have been facing for some time now but said that he was hoping that it would not persist in their new system.

“Goalscoring has been a problem in the last few years for Bangladesh. I think with the changes in our play, we will get good chances to score and we will be in the right areas to score. We have to also keep a clean sheet defensively,” the midfielder said.

Bangladesh have a strong recent record against Sri Lanka as they have three wins in the last five matches against them.

But Jamal is not thinking about the past as he wants to play every game in the tournament like a final.

“I’m not worrying about the past. Tomorrow is a different match. We will have a different attitude because each game is a new game and you cannot think about previous results. In this tournament, every game is like a final,” he said.

Bangladesh have had a torrid time in the last three SAFF Championships as the red and greens have won only three games in their last 12 matches in the tournament.

The last time Bangladesh managed to reach the semi-finals was at home in 2009. Since then, Bangladesh have crashed out of the group stage for four tournaments in a row.

The last time Bangladesh managed to win the tournament was in 2003, and they reached the final in the next edition in 2005 and have failed to repeat that since then.