The Malaysia Experiment - First Cut Is The Deepest

"It may look like I'm doing nothing,
but in my head, I'm quite busy." - Anonymous

So what should a national manager do when there are no international matches? Watch football I suppose. That's what I got on doing. Picked the Asian Confederation Cup (second-tier club competition in Asia) match between Johor DT and Quang Ninh from Vietnam. Flew all the way to Quảng Ninh, Vietnam; but boy I was in for a treat. The match served up 8 goals and players from Harimau Malaya did pretty well. Mohd Yusop had a good rating of 8.4 while playing on the wing!

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Too bad Shahri couldn't keep a clean sheet. Bumped into John Herdman as well. He was keeping tabs on Corbin-Ong. Strangely in real life, he represented Canada for a match, and then represented Malaysia afterward!

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Picked my squad for the upcoming friendly against Hong Kong (154th), as well as our toughest fixture in Group F, against Jordan (82nd). I didn't spring too many surprises, with Che Mat replacing Harun, as well as potential first caps for Muhd Syahmi Safari, Zhafri Yahya and Saiful Ridzuan Selamat (3 of them still yet to represent Malaysia in real life). I just love handling out debuts. I would say it's also a better spread among various clubs, with only 6 representatives from Johor DT this time around. They've been showing interest in Brendan Gan for the longest time, but no contract has been offered or signed yet.

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Oh, and we've been rising up the rankings. We moved up 22 places in April, and another 19 places to 110th in May. Let's hope there won't be too many changes after the Jordan match. :/

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Alright, before flying to Jordan, we've got a pit shop at Hong Kong. My U19s manager, Mohd Nizar Zakaria gave me a text about their 4-0 against Syria U19s (hope do they even find the players to form the team). Man of the match goes to Muhd Juzaerul Jasmi again. I think I should monitor his progress closely from now on.

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The U19s are actually full of potential, with more than half the team 5 stars on PA! We've not even reached July, when the newgens appear (this is when the experiment really kicks in). This is getting me very excited! :)

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I've decided to give debuts to all 3 of them while filling the rest of the first team with our younger players. Playing Mohd Yusop on the right wing since he plays that role for his club.

The match started off with Hong Kong being much in control, but we slowly grew into the game. Selamat repaid my faith with a beautiful pass over the top, Raaj Baarathy controlled it with a good first touch, turned around and scored! Halftime came and I decided to pull out Brendan Gan as he was performing poorly, making 2 mistakes. We weren't doing too well in the second half, and sure enough, they equalized on the 68th minute. I was pretty enraged. Just have a look at the heat map! :/

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