Kitchee Coaches and Players Ready to Put Preseason

With more than a full month of preseason grunt work under their belts, Kitchee coaching staffs and players are all ready to put their hard work into good use by coming up with some decent performances in the season ahead, especially for the first-leg of the AFC Cup quarter-final next week against Kuwait SC in the Middle East. After spending the preseason trying to get to know his charges, newly-appointed head coach Abraham Garcia is happy with how his troops have responded so far. “Preseason is a crucial time for the players to get their work in and we need to check the players that we plan to use for the upcoming AFC Cup quarter-final,” commented Garcia. “As you know, the local game is quite different from the AFC Cup so we need to have a lot of different experiments to see what works best for the team. Now that all the friendly matches and experiments are over, both the coaches and the players are really looking forward to the AFC Cup quarter-final.” Veteran full-back Tong Kin-man sheds light on the emphasis placed on the preseason programme installed by Garcia and his backroom staffs. “We have been practicing a lot of our short passes throughout the preseason and as time goes by, I can definitely see the team’s improvement in that regard,” Tong noted. “A lot of the work that we did over preseason was geared towards the game against Kuwait SC. The coaching staffs really went back to the basics with us throughout preseason and we did a lot of work emphasizing on producing good, solid passes, as well as our positioning on the pitch. Striker Juan Belencoso notes that while Kitchee players are slowly rounding into form, nothing will stop him and his teammates to obtain a positive result in the upcoming AFC Cup quarter-final. “Even with a solid preseason behind us, I think our overall form is around 70% at this moment. We did a lot of good work throughout the summer, trained hard in every session and played in some tough and demanding practice matches against quality sides from South Korea and Japan. These were not easy games and they really improved our form,” revealed the Spaniard. “Waiting ahead of us will be the very important away game against Kuwait SC and we will come out, be aggressive, try to score and snatch a win.”