Bangladesh football team assistant coach Stuart Watkiss, in charge of the national side in the absence of Covid-19 struck head coach Jamie Day, is counting the days before they can start training in Qatar.
Bangladesh will take on 2022 World Cup host and reigning Asian Cup champion Qatar on December 4 in their rescheduled joint qualifying fixture.
Ahead of the joint qualifier, the Bengal Tigers reached Qatar Thursday and are currently undergoing mandatory three-day quarantine.
The men in red and green beat Nepal in the two-game Mujib Barsho Fifa International Football Series 2020 at Bangabandhu National Stadium recently but Watkiss said Qatar will be a much stiffer test than the Himalayan nation.
Jamal Bhuiyan, the Bangladesh football team captain, is bracing himself for a very busy next year.
Posted by Sports Tribune on Friday, 20 November 2020
“Unfortunately, two of the Bangladeshi staff have tested positive for Covid-19, the team manager (Amer Khan) and the physio (Fuad Hasan Hawlader), so that’s a great shame. Because of that, the Qatari FA (Football Association) have informed us that everybody must now stay in their rooms, in isolation, to obviously prevent the spread of the disease. So that’s what we are doing at the moment,” the English coach said in a video circulated by Bangladesh Football Federation Friday.
“We are all due to be retested tomorrow (Saturday) and hopefully we’ll get the results back the day after (Sunday). If everything is okay then we can resume training but as it stands at the moment we are not able to do anything like the training we would like to do, or anything in terms of preparation as we would like to do.
“At the moment that’s all we can do, it’s not an ideal situation, in fact it’s far from an ideal situation. Everyone’s welfare and well being must be the first thing we take into account. Everybody wants to get back to training as early as possible. We can’t afford to miss any days of training in the build-up to the Qatar game, never mind a possible three or four days of training. We’ll have to see what the next tests are, the results, and obviously we can make new plans for training.”
