Al Wakrah go head to head against fellow strugglers Al Arabi in round nine of the QSL. The match will take place on Thursday at the Al Wakrah stadium.

 Al Wakrah is in a tough situation as they are bottom of the league with only three points from eight games. The Blue Waves will be looking to get maximum points against Al Arabi to keep their survival hopes alive.

 Kais Yâakoubi, the head coach of Al Wakrah believes it will be a tough game, “Al Arabi is a team that lost more than three games. However, on the individual level, they are one of the best teams in the league. The technical value of the team is high. They are facing some troubles and we will try to benefit from their mistakes.”

 “Our main problem is that we are in the last position and it affects the player’s mentality, if we have points we can overcome this. Our problem is creating goals. Creating opportunities is fine but finishing is an issue,” added the Tunisian head coach at the press conference on Wednesday.

Yakoubi is looking for efficiency from his side, “We are working with players to be more efficient in front of the goal. The worst thing for strikers is self-doubt but when the team is not doing well the strikers are often not on form. We are not focusing on changing players, we can’t speak about that as we are planning to use what we have and I’m always optimistic and expect better from my team.”



Al Arabi is heading into the game off the back off five straight losses and are in the drop zone at the moment. The Dream team will be looking to get back to the glory days with a win against Al Wakrah.

Edison Aguirre, the head coach of Al Arabi gave his thoughts on his first matches in charge, “Since I came to be the coach of the team we have two different matches. One was the derby against Al Sadd and now we have Al Wakrah, two very different teams which require two different approaches. Now we will focus in this match on the balance of defence and attack.”

“We had Paulinho in attack against Gharafa and Sadd. The first half was good second half wasn’t good. So from now on we will be looking for more attack,” added the Brazilian tactician at the press conference on Wednesday.

Aguirre spoke about finding the right balance and rhythm for his team, “The first thing I analyzed is that I look for patterns behaviours.We need to find the right balance in the team. If you see the match against Al Sadd, you see we concede late on and we are damaged mentally so we need to find the balance. We have to be positive for the upcoming games.”