‘Red Warriors’ hoping big from coach Ivankovic

The newly-appointed head coach of the Oman national football team Branko Ivankovic will begin his opening technical supervision for the first training camp on February 16. After completion of the contract signing function and a press conference to the media, the coach was very keen to attend many league matches as he did that in the last two rounds of Omantel League. The 65-year-old coach delegated his technical staff to cover many league matches and to note down all the technical notes on the local players’ performance and skills. The upcoming internal camp is expected to feature many new faces including the potential players. The mentioned briefing camp will be followed with a fairly long preparatory camp which is expected to take place in the middle of the next month and it will feature an international friendly match against New Zealand team on March 26. The warm up match will be prior to the ‘Red Warriors’ match in the World Cup qualifiers Group E match against Afghanistan on March 31 and then against Asian champions Qatar in Muscat on June 4. Oman now possess 12 points from five matches while Qatar are topping the group by 13 points from the same number of games. The former Iran coach will be present at the league matches of round 18 which started on Friday and will complete on Saturday. He will attend the Fanja match against Al Nasr at Seeb Stadium while the other members of the technical staff will present the other matches including Al Nahda who will take on Sohar at Al Buraimi Sports Complex and the Omantel League leaders will travel to Ibri to face Bahla at Ibri Youth Complex. In a similar step, the Croatian coach began his visit to the Omantel League clubs premises. Branko met the technical staff of Seeb and Muscat teams and he will continue with Oman Club soon and then the rest of the top domestic teams. The main objective of these visits is to know more about the internal clubs and a brief on the abilities of the players. The former coach of Al Ahli Club (Saudi Arabia) discussed with the team’s coaches on the further ways of cooperating and developing the local players and knowing more about the potential players. Oman fans are very optimistic and they raised their expectations very high after Oman Football Association (OFA) had signed a two-year contract with the experienced Croatian coach Branko Ivankovic. The “Red Warriors” spectators are expressed in different sports accounts at Twitter their confidence on the new coach. They requested OFA to provide all the success factors to the coach to achieve his target. The curriculum vitae of the Croatian coach is very strong as he was behind Iran’s qualification to the World Cup in Germany in 2006 and winning the third place with them at AFC Asian Cup in 2004.