A 30-MEMBER Bahrain football squad will leave for Abha, Saudi Arabia, on Thursday where they will take on Yemen the next day in their first Group H game of the second round of the 2026 Fifa World Cup Asian Qualifiers.
Head coach Juan Antonio Pizzi will accompany the team which will be led by goalkeeper Sayed Mohamed Jaafar.
The 36 teams – divided into nine groups of four sides each – are competing in the Asian Qualifiers. The UAE and Nepal are the other two teams in Group H.
Pizzi said yesterday that he and the players were satisfied with their preparation for the important encounter which will be held at the Prince Sultan bin Abdul Aziz Stadium.
“We are very happy with our preparation,” he said.
“We have played four international friendlies over the past two months and benefited a lot from them, as well as from the training camps we held earlier.”
Pizzi, who only took charge last July, chaperoned a 20-member squad to Serbia and then to Dubai from mid-August to early September for successive training camps.
While in Dubai, Bahrain also played the first two of their four international friendlies, losing to Kuwait 3-1 in the first and drawing 1-1 with Turkmenistan.
After returning to the kingdom, they played two more, beating Kyrgyzstan 2-0 and the Philippines 1-0.
Pizzi, who has brought his possession-based philosophy to the Bahrain camp, wasn’t afraid to experiment with different combinations in the four games as he sought to identify what would work best for his team.
“Like I said, we’re very happy with the work we’ve done to prepare for this game,” Pizzi said.
“We’ve also kept an eye on the Yemen team and know that they’ve been in a training camp for more than ten days now.”
Since conditions in Abha won’t be much different from Bahrain’s at this time of year, Pizzi added, the team’s arrival in the Saudi Arabian city just a day before the match wouldn’t pose a problem for the players in terms of acclimatising to the local climate.
“We are used to the climate,” he explained.
“And we are well prepared for this game.”
The Reds’ next opponents, after the match against Yemen, will be the UAE, whom they take on five days later at the Bahrain National Stadium.
The squad: Sayed Mohamed Jaafar (captain/goalkeeper), Ameen bin Udai, Walid Al Hayam, Abdullah Al Khalasi, Mubarak Mohammed, Ibrahim Lutfallah, Abdullah Duaij, Abdulla Yusuf Helal, Abdulkarim Fardan, Ali Hasan, Sayed Mahdi Baqer, Hussain Al Eker, Kumail Al Aswad, Jassim Al Shaikh, Mohammed Abdul Qayoom, Hazaa Ali, Ibrahim Al Khatal, Mahdi Humaidan, Ahmed Bu Ghamar, Mohammed Adel, Mohammed Al Hardan, Mohammed Abdulwahab, Ibrahim Al Wali, Mohammed Marhoon, Ali Madan, Mousis Atidi, Hussain Abdulkareem, Hamad Aldoseri, Hussain Salem and Jassim Khulaif.
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