Doha, November 21 (QNA) – The Argentina national football team will meet its Saudi counterpart at 1:00 pm Tuesday at Lusail Stadium within Group C competitions.
Group C also includes Mexico and Poland who will also meet on the same day.
Argentina national football team is seeking to record a strong opening that lives up to its nominations to win the World Cup title, relying on a group of prominent stars such as Inter Milan player Lautaro Martinez, Juventus star Angel Di Maria, Roma player Paulo Dybala, as well as Atletico Madrid’s Rodrigo de Paul, and Leandro Paredes of Juventus.
Messi leads his country, hoping for a third title in the country’s history after winning Argentina 1978 and Mexico 1986. The World Cup title is only missing one from the Argentine stars treasuries, who achieved everything in his career by winning the Champions League four times and achieved a number of Spanish League titles with Barcelona and then won the French League with Paris Saint-Germain, before achieving his first continental crown by winning the 2021 Copa America.
The confrontation will not be easy for the Saudi national team, which will record its sixth presence in the World Cup when it meets Lionel Messi.
The Saudi team arrived in Doha on Nov. 16, settled in Sealine Beach Resort and trained on the resorts stadiums in preparation for the first confrontation. The mission of the Argentine team arrived in Doha last Thursday, Nov. 17, and settled at Qatar University (QU), where the team conducted its direct preparatory training for the start of the World Cup on university stadiums.
That confrontation will be the first direct between the two teams in the history of the World Cup, but it is the third in various friendly and official matches. The two teams met in the Confederations Cup hosted by Saudi Arabia in 1992 where the Argentine team won three goals to one. The two teams met in a friendly in 2012 in Riyadh and the meeting ended in a negative draw.
The Saudi team, led by French Coach Herve Renard hopes to repeat the most prominent and only achievement in the history of its participation in the World Cup when it reached the second round of the World Cup finals held in the US, where it achieved impressive results in the group stage, surpassing the loss against the Netherlands at the beginning of the journey and the victory over the Moroccan team by two goals to one, and then the victory over the Belgian team with a wonderful goal by former star Saeed Al-Owairan, to reach the second round and lose to the Swedish team and leave with his head held high.
Since then, the Saudi national team has been looking to repeat what it did in the US, but it has not been able to do so on four occasions: France 1998, South Korea and Japan 2002, Germany 2006, and Russia 2018.
The Saudi team made good performances in the Asian qualifiers for the World Cup in Qatar and booked its place in the finals after a competition with the Japanese team, pushing the strong Australian team towards the continental play-off and then the international play-off.
Renard is counting on a homogeneous group of players, most of whom are active in the Al Hilal Saudi Football Club, such as Salem Aldawsari, Salman Al-Faraj, Yasser Alshahrani, and Mohamed Kanno, who the French coach adheres to despite the suspension period he spent. While Nawaf Alabid was invited instead of Fahad Al-Muwallad.
(QNA)