Bahrain to face Serbian club tonight in friendly match

TDT | Manama    

The Daily Tribune – www.newsofbahrain.com

Bahrain’s senior men’s national football team are set to play a friendly match tonight against Serbian professional football club FK Radnicki Sremska Mitrovica.

The match is scheduled for a 6pm kickoff, Bahrain time, and it will be the first tuneup game for the Bahrainis in their overseas training camp in Belgrade, which kicked off last week.

The nationals are in the Serbian capital until 2 September conducting daily training sessions under head coach Juan Antonio Pizzi.

Aside from their practices on the football pitch, the Bahrainis are also conducting a physical fitness programme supervised by Pizzi’s staff.

There is a 20-player Bahrain team at the camp, which is being used as part of Bahrain’s preparations for their upcoming continental qualifying campaign for the 2026 FIFA World Cup, starting this November.

The team’s roster includes Hamza Al Juban, Amine Hasan, Abdulla Al Khalasi, Hussain Jameel, Sayed Mohammed Jaafar, Sayed Redha Issa, Abdulkarim Al Fardan, Ahmed Al Sherooqi, Mubarak Mohammed, Waleed Al Hayyam, Ahmed Nabeel, Ali Hassan Saeed, Komail Alaswad, Ali Haram, Jassim Al Shaikh, Talal Al Sherooqi, Abbas Al Asfoor, Ebrahim Luthfallah, Ebrahim Al Khattal and Ahmed Moussa.

A number of Bahrain’s other players, such as their three overseas-based professionals, are expected to join the nationals when they depart Serbia for Dubai next month.

There, Bahrain will play two international friendly matches against Kuwait on 7 September and then with Turkmenistan on 12 September. The Bahrainis will also play two more exhibition games in October, both at home.

They will lock horns with the Philippines men’s national team on 12 October and then against Kyrgyzstan on 17 October.

Aside from World Cup qualification, Bahrain are also gearing up for the next edition of the AFC Asian Cup, to be held in Doha in January of next year.

There are five rounds in the World Cup qualification format for the Asian Football Confederation (AFC), which will have eight teams book their tickets to the global showcase, plus potentially another following an inter-confederation play-off.

Bahrain will play directly in the second round of qualifiers starting November.

They have been drawn in a competitive Group H along with the UAE, and either Yemen or Sri Lanka and Nepal or Laos.

The nationals kick off their campaign on 16 November against either Yemen or Sri Lanka. There are 36 nations in all in this phase, divided into nine groups of four.

The teams will play against each other on a home-and-away basis. The nine group winners and group runners-up advance to the third round.

In addition to this, they will also automatically qualify for the 2027 AFC A s i a n Cup.