Friendly Preview: Algeria – Serbia

March 2nd, 2010 | by: Nikola | Comments(4)

Well, ladies and gentlemen, after a long break from international duties, we’re back to seeing our beloved “White Eagles” do what they did best for the last few years: making half the country flock in front of their TV’s to watch their (mostly successful) games. This one is not going to be an exception, Antić’s men travel to Africa for the second time in less than a year in order to play a friendly against Algeria, also a participant of the forthcoming World Cup and a team best known for eliminating African champions Egypt after a set of remarkable matches played in October and November 2009. The Algerians have proven both their mental toughness and ability after defeating Egypt 1-0 in a game played in Sudan at a time when everyone expected Egypt to qualify on the wings of their 2-0 victory in the last round of the qualifiers. “The Pharaohs” have managed to avenge that defeat by eliminating Algeria 4-0 in the CAN semi-final and later defending their title against our future World Cup opponents, Ghana, but I assume Algerians are far too satisfied with playing in the World Cup to be too disappointed by everything that has happened at their latest tournament. And while they are not given many chances at the World Cup proper, they should represent a formidable obstacle for Antić’s men. They are a quality team with a host of Europe-based players and possess a fiery fan-base that should carry them throughout the full 90 minutes, so “The White Eagles” should be ready for a hellish atmosphere and a team pretty high on morale. After all, they have many reasons to be.

This friendly is also interesting because of the following: Serbia travels to Algeria in order to tackle an African opponent on it’s own soil, (a mini-preparation for the game against Ghana, one would say) while Algeria hopes to gain an insight into their own World Cup opponents, Slovenia, who belong to the same football school as Serbia. Most teams seem to follow the same logic and our future opponents, Ghana, also tackle one of our neighbors and fellow ex-Yugoslavians, Bosnia and Herzegovina. It should be interesting to see what do these games tell us about our chances against “The Black Stars”.

Team news:

All the players that were part of the team in the last few games have been called up, while the only notable addition is Boško Janković, who has finally made his recovery from a knee injury he suffered at the start of the season. Nemanja Vidić, however, hasn’t travelled with the team to Algeria, he is just back from his own injury and Antić decided not to take him to Africa, even though he was called up and went through training with his NT team-mates. Miralem Sulejmani is wih the U21’s, Ivan Obradović hasn’t recovered from his injury that has kept him out of the team towards the end of last year, while goalkeeper Vladimir Dišljenković seems poised to completely quit the national team, but more about that in an another article. Here’s the list:

Goakeepers: Vladimir Stojković (Wigan), Željko Brkić (Vojvodina)

Attackers: Nikola Žigić (Valencia), Danko Lazović (PSV Eindhoven), Marko Pantelić (Ajax), Dejan Lekić (Crvena zvezda)

My comments regarding the list? Nothing new, nothing unexpected. While it is true that one shouldn’t change the team that wins, I honestly feel we should include more youngsters in the team and give a chance to some players that are knocking on the doors of the NT with their displays for a long time now.
Pavle Ninkov is a versatile right-back that plays for Crvena Zvezda and seems poised for a big-money move abroad very soon, but he is left out again and again, with Ivanović being shifted right over and over again to fill the gap that we seem to have with Antonio Rukavina clearly not being good enough for the big stage. It might be that Antić doesn’t like to have offensive-minded full-backs and therefore prefers to put Ivanović on the right and Luković or Dragutinović on the left, but I’m yet to hear why Antonio Rukavina keeps getting called-up ahead of Ninkov.
About the youngsters, I’d like to see more chances given to Miralem Sulejmani, Nemanja Matić and Adem Ljajić. Sulejmani is perhaps a luxury with his prime position, left wing, being overcrowded, but both Matić and Ljajić are that type of players that we seem to lack: attacking midfielders with good passing and goalscoring abilities. Matić isn’t getting the playing time he needs at Chelsea, being left on the bench in almost every game and Fiorentina’s Ljajić might be extremely young for this level, but aren’t these the games when such experiments are to be undertaken? I’d like to see us trying to have more options in all areas of the pitch, preferably with highly talented youngsters that we seem to have in abundance. I have full faith in Antić and his players, but I honestly believe we are starting to be too conservative with our squad selections. I just hope that this doesn’t come to haunt us at one point, before, during, or maybe even after the World Cup.

Go White Eagles!