Coach Saintfiet finally signs two-month deal with BFF
Sports reporter
Tom Saintfiet officially signed on a two months deal with the Bangladesh Football Federation (BFF) along with Paul Thomas Smally as a strategic director, signed for two years yesterday.
Tom Saintfiet the man form the world number one in FIFA ranking, Belgium, who already started the job unofficially from the last week of July done the agreement yesterday, is the 18th foreign coach of Bangladesh national football team while he replaced the Italian Fabio Lopez.
However, Saintfiet is appointed to prepare the national football team to cross the Bhutan hurdle of the Asian Cup play offs to qualify to be held on September 6 and 10 in home and away ground respectively.
Chairman of the Bangladesh National team Committee, Kazi Nabil Ahmed after the signing ceremony told the reporters that they appointed Saintfiet and Paul Smally for two months, mainly for the Asian Cup Qualifying matches but the agreement can be longer time after watching their experiences during their works in two months contact.
Nabil said, We will have some strong support from FIFA for our development programme very soon, so to run the development programme we will have to set long term plans and Paul Smaly is appointed to work with us.
In fact, the future of the relationship between the coach and the strategic director with the BFF is depends on their performances in the next two months in the Bhutan assignment and we are keenly wait for the result of the coming two matches against Bhutan.
Smally, might be the first man is appointed by the BFF as a strategic and technical director, in his immediate reaction with reporters said that he was highly glad to be the part of the BFF in their (BFF) development programme.
I am extremely excited by the opportunity, extremely impressed by professionalism of BFF, excited by presidents vision. Hopefully I can make very valuable contribution in developing Bangladesh football.
Smally was also happy with having the opportunity to work with Saintfiet said, Im certainly looking forward to work with Tom. Im also extremely excited to have Tom here as senior national coach and his experience throughout the world with national teams, if you look at his results, passion, his ability to initiate change and to win football matches, so Im happy to work closely with him.
Im committed for two years. Obviously the development of the game is gonna take longer than two years. But my ambition is to put impression very quickly of plan that recognized outside of Bangladesh in compares very favorably with some of the best technical strategic plans in the world. I have significance experience at this that the technical plans are important because they create a pathway for the achievement of lot of development in the game, Sammy explained.
With the help of people here in Bangladesh and local experienced people we can produce a plan that clearly illustrates and describes what we are going to do next four years. Thats my early priority and that take longer than two years, Sammy told about his priority of works and future with BFF.
My very priority would be to develop coaches here of Bangladesh because if you are going to develop best that we need best teachers. So my early priority is going to look at the infrastructures here, the English revealed.
If you look at eight divisions, certainly some ideas I have and I need to take some guidance but we need to develop a league senses where we can work closely throughout the country with some of the best coaches. We also have to develop best teachers of coaches because they have many influence and change in development of players.
