On behalf of all the Maldivians who are true to Maldivian football, I would like to say Thank you coach Petar Segrt. Thank you all your assistants. I didn't see much appreciation for you in celebrations. which is not fair to be honest. After all you are the captain of the ship. 

To be honest after you dropped Ali Ashfaq i lost faith in the team. I did not even want to watch the SAFF Games.

But like most of us, we love the Maldives team and we streamed online to watch the game. When i saw that you had Baka (Mohamed Arif) and Irey (Mohamed Irufan) in defense my fears got worse. To not win against Sri Lanka is like a defeat. They even had a perfectly good goal disallowed. Thank God that SAFF doesn't use VAR(Video Assistant Referee). I think that was the worst game Maldives ever played in. Except for the goal keeper (Mohamed Faisal) we would have conceded few goals. The Sri Lanka goal keeper also had a busy day but not like the Maldivian keeper. The thought on all my friends watching with me was saying that the team really really needs Dhagandey (Ali Ashfaq).

Against India it was worse, again the two defensive midfielders. No creativity in midfield at all. We lost and i got so angry i didn't even watch what happened. I was convinced we didn't deserve it. But the toss of the coin changed everything. I saw that on the news and thought whats the point. Nepal will humiliate us. For the first time we didn't even score a goal in the group stages. Only a mistake by the referee and a toss of a coin has given us a second lifeline. 

After that it was all different. The team cannot raise up without it's leader. On the field the leader you appointed raised up Akram Abdul Ghani showed why he's the leader by scoring early on. The team selection was complete revolution. Segrt you have to guts to take the risk and we appreciate it. Congratulations Bassam for finding this gem. Again the rain made it impossible for Nepal to play their beautiful passing game and again luck smiled on us. Only good saves and few awful misses from Nepal kept the score at 1-0. Enter Ibrahim Waheed(Ibbe)! Two clinical goals. we took our chances Nepal didn't. 

The Final is there for all of us to see. What under23?! Who asked India to send a junior team. We owned them. the difference was we finished our chances. What a game. The introduction of Baka (Mohamed Arif) in the latter stages of the game was also brilliant. He also created a goal for Sentey (Ali Fasir) who almost made it 3-0 at the time. 

This is Brilliant Segrt. Hope you stay with us for a long time. Thank you sir. My only request is that bring back Ali Ashfaq (Dhagandey), I promise you, people will love you even more then.

From -DHIVEHI DHARIYEH-

(via Viber)

(The content of this is from our readers, we do not necessarily agree or disagree with its contents- the readers may mail to this column at [email protected] or message our Facebook page. You may mail us in essay form or in point form, we will write it for you if it is more than 300 words we will post in this column)

Photo: ImagedMV