New coach Yusri wants to fix KL’s problem at the back

PETALING JAYA: New Kuala Lumpur coach Yusri Che Lah’s first task is to fix the leaky defence.

The City Boys finished 10th in the 12-team Super League; bottom of their Malaysia Cup group and reached the quarter-finals of the FA Cup.

But they conceded a whopping 70 goals and scored 58 goals last season.

The Klang Valley outfit conceded 51 goals from 22 Super League matches, the highest in the topflight competition.

Yusri said the statistics from last season showed that they were not balanced in their attacking and defence and among the reason for the shortcoming was the team’s lack of endurance.

“This team have no problem scoring, but the issue is with defending. The teams had conceded way too many goals to my liking, and it’s something that should not happen in the top flight,” said the former international yesterday.

“The statistics that I gathered from the team last season showed that the team lacked endurance and struggled to see out matches as the players fade out at the tail end of the games.”

“So my focus now is to get the team endurance up to mark. I want the team to have no problem to play at a high tempo for 90 minutes all season long so for the last two weeks we have been working on the players’ endurance in training.”

Kuala Lumpur retained 85% of last season’s squad and had signed Dutch striker Sylvano Dominique Comvalius, Japanese midfielder Ryutaro Karube, defenders Khair Jones, Fitri Omar, Alif Samsudin and goalkeeper Faridzuean Kamarudin.

Yusri added that KL’s defensive duo Irfan Zakaria and Syazwan Andik would be joining the team’s pre-season training after a 10-day break for featuring in the AFF Suzuki Cup campaign recently.

“Syazwan and Irfan had a good outing with the national team, and I think they need a break after their Suzuki Cup campaign.

“I don’t think they will have problem gelling with the rest of the team if they can produce the same level of performance with the national team,” said the 45-yearold coach.