KOTA KINABALU: President Cup head coach Justin Ganai will finalise the names of the 30 players to be registered for the new season by Tuesday. The veteran coach disclosed this after the team’s friendly against the State Youth Cup selection at the Likas synthetic pitch, Friday night. “I should be able to identify who will make the final squad on Tuesday.
The 16 players retained from last season are likely to stay and what I am hoping to look for are players who can play in more than one position, but that is also not a major issue as it can be taught. “At the moment we have 35 players training with us and Mohd Izzat Aziz who played for Selangor United in the President Cuplast season really caught my attention with his composure and intelligence playing as centre back.”
On the 3-1 win over the Youth Cup selection in the friendly, he played down the result and said it was not a very good team performance as expected by him. “I was not very pleased with the overall performance of the team even though we won the game. “All of the players obviously can play but I can see that the combination is still not up to the mark and that is probably because we only had five days of training before that.” “I will like to see them in more friendly matches and hopefully we can get at least two more against local teams next week,” he added. -GL Oh
