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Tribune News Network
Doha
The second day of the 5th edition of the “Aspire Academy Global Summit” on Football Performance and Science offered many highlights to the delegates with two ‘Star Chats’ featuring Qatar National Team Coach Felix Sanchez and former Argentinian star striker Hernan Crespo.
Besides going deeper in two of the summit’s main topics, the group also had the opportunity to see a research presentation, got a tour of the Football Performance Center and had the chance show their football skills in a “Fellows Football Match”.
Speaking on Qatar’s 2019 AFC Asian Cup success, head coach Felix Sanchez said that success and responsibility go hand in hand and that it meant for the team to keep up the good work and to push themselves even more in the future.
“In times of success it’s important to set yourself clear targets to keep up the motivation and for us, these targets were the Copa America and the Asian Cup qualifiers,” the Spaniard said.
In terms of inspiration of young Qatari footballers, Sanchez is not limiting it to the recent success of Qatar’s football national team, he also thinks that Aspire Academy graduate and high jumper Mutaz Essa Barshim, who just won a gold medal for Qatar at the recent 2019 IAAF Athletics World Championships in Doha, can be a role model for his team and future national team players.
“It shows that someone coming from a small country like Qatar can set himself high goals and also reach them. In football it’s quite similar. All of us, the Qatar Football Association, Aspire Academy and the clubs are working towards the same target, which makes our daily work much easier. We all have the passion to do something big for Qatar in 2022 and have a competitive team at the World Cup.”
In the second star chat of the day, former Argentine and Parma striker Hernan Crespo said that he believes today’s football player has his focus and attention highly demanded of by several non-football matters.
“We need to help players get back the soul of football once again. The business around and accruing from playing football such as advertising, commercial marketing and social media means that the player’s focus is no longer only on football and maybe we should go back to the principal goal of playing football”, said Crespo, who was until recent manager of Argentine premier division team, Banfield and is well known for scoring goals for fun with Italian Serie A club Parma, his first club in Europe when he left River Plate in 1996.
Another topic in the focus was “Optimizing the recovery process in youth players” dealing with the issue that in elite player development, an appropriate balance between match and training load and recovery is critical to optimize performance in training and competition. A familiar face among the delegates, that paid particularly much attention in this and every other session of the Global Summit, is former Australian international Tim Cahill, who is currently starting his coaching career at the academy of Everton FC.
“To see the thoughts and comments from different clubs around the world was very interesting and for me the main thing that I take is not to give too much to kids young and to make them a bit resilient, but also to focus on the mental aspects and the psychology of younger players,” said Cahill, who was also featured in a Star Chat during the Gala Dinner at the Museum of Islamic Arts alongside former Cameroon and Barcelona striker Samuel Eto’o.
Eto’o pointed out that he was not sure yet about his next step after retiring from playing football and went on to describe what it was like working with Pep Guardiola and Jose Mourinho, two of the more celebrated managers in current times. The relationship between Guardiola and Eto’o at Barcelona has been well documented and the Cameroonian said of his former manager, “I love him as a coach, and he was the best at interpreting the match and giving you the message required for the game. I learned to play football with him, and he could interpret a match better than anyone. As for Guardiola, the person, that is a different story.”
The Aspire Academy Global Summit concludes on Wednesday with a couple of workshops and applied sessions. There will be two Star Chats taking place featuring former Iceland National Team coach and current Al Arabi coach Heimir Hallgrimsson and former Fulham and current Al Gharafa head coach Salvisa Jokanovic.
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09/10/2019
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