Al Duhail coach Christophe Galtier spoke to the media ahead of their 2024-2025 season Ooredoo Stars League Week 7 match against Al Ahli.

“Al Ahli are an organized team with collective skills and distinguished players at the individual level, such as Draxler and our former player Abdulrahman Mustafa who has been performing well since the beginning of the season with Al Ahli, but we are ready.

“As you know, we went through a long international break and this certainly affected our preparations for the match because we have many international players with the national team, in addition to Michael Olunga who returned from participating with his country’s national team Kenya as well and we did not have enough opportunity to prepare for the next match.

“We must regain our level with which we started the season despite the recent loss we received at the hands of our competitors Al Shahania in which we made many mistakes and wasted many opportunities that cost us the loss of the three points of the match, but we prepared well for Al Ahli, the organized team that is good at playing on counterattacks in addition to organization and good positioning on the field. We worked on addressing the mistakes that appeared against Al Shahania and we will try to be more effective and realistic,” said Galtier.

Al Duhail goalkeeper Salah Zakaria said, “As our coach mentioned, our team includes many international players and the team faces some difficulties after returning from the international break, but I have full confidence in the experience of my teammates and our ability to collect all points of the match.

“We are all professional players and we know very well how to differentiate between our time with the national team and returning to participate with the club. We have finished our participation with the national team. We will provide a better level, but all our focus is currently with the club and due to the short time we must quickly adapt and return to focus with the team.

“Of course, the Best Goalkeeper Award, which was approved as an official award, is a very good initiative and encourages many young people to perform better, but I am not thinking about any individual titles and all I am thinking about is winning collective titles, most notably the league championship.”