AL AIN // Winfried Schaefer, who was sacked as the coach of Al Ain last week despite winning three trophies this year, has warned national sides from the Middle East will not qualify for World Cup finals until domestic clubs show more patience with managers.
Schaefer, who as the Cameroon coach won the 2002 African Cup of Nations and reached the 2002 World Cup finals, became the fourth Pro League coach to lose his job this season after losing two matches in a row.
"Winning and losing is a part of football, but one must look at the overall picture before arriving at a decision," said the German.
"In every established football nation it is the domestic leagues that set the benchmark of the national teams. The club coaches must be given more time, at least four or five years, to develop a team. Sadly it is lacking in the Middle East, and this is one of the main reasons none of them are in the 2010 World Cup finals."
Schaefer has done his part to infuse fresh blood into an Al Ain team who had not won a trophy since the President's Cup in 2005-2006. He was rewarded with a cup double last season and qualification for the Asian Champions League after finishing third in the league.
Yet their President's Cup shoot-out loss to Ajman, followed by a 1-0 away defeat to title-chasing Al Wahda in the league was enough for Schaefer to lose his job. Without him, Al Ain suffered a 3-1 home defeat to Al Wasl on Sunday as they dropped to fourth in the league, eight points behind the leaders Al Jazira.
Schaefer spent almost two years in charge at Al Ain and now hopes to find further work in the Pro League
"I still feel the team had done pretty well despite the President's Cup loss. Al Ain are still in the race for the league and Etisalat Cup," he said. "I will stay here for a while and see what opportunities may come. I was sad but not surprised when they terminated my contract, I spent two very good years at Al Ain and I was sure of winning the league this season.
"At the start of the season, I said I wanted to win all for Al Ain. But our main goal was to win the league and play in the Club World Cup.
"We had three good foreign players [Jorge Valdivia, Marcio Emerson and Jose Sand] but they can't be doing all the work in every game. We played without Valdivia and lost two games but this is not uncommon; every team goes through this phase."
Schaefer led Al Ahli to the league title in his first season in 2005-2006 but did not have the same success in the following year and parted company with the Dubai club. After moving to Al Ain, Schaefer's first task was to make wholesale changes to the first-team squad, with many senior players leaving.
"The changes were also good for the players," he said. "We needed fresh blood and I brought in some youngsters who never had the opportunity to play in the first team. We had seven of them in the national team.
"These players now carry a higher price tag and the value of the team is much higher."
The brothers Mohammed and Fawzi Fayez, Salem Abdulla, Abdulla Malallah, Ahmed Medhad, Ahmed Khamis, and Mohannad al Enazi emerged from the youth squad, and Fares Juma, Musallam Fayez, Waled Salem and Mutaz Abdulla won their places back in the national team.
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Company name: BorrowMe (BorrowMe.com)
Date started: August 2021
Founder: Nour Sabri
Based: Dubai, UAE
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Name: HyperSpace
Started: 2020
Founders: Alexander Heller, Rama Allen and Desi Gonzalez
Based: Dubai, UAE
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Attacks on Egypt’s long rooted Copts
Egypt’s Copts belong to one of the world’s oldest Christian communities, with Mark the Evangelist credited with founding their church around 300 AD. Orthodox Christians account for the overwhelming majority of Christians in Egypt, with the rest mainly made up of Greek Orthodox, Catholics and Anglicans.
The community accounts for some 10 per cent of Egypt’s 100 million people, with the largest concentrations of Christians found in Cairo, Alexandria and the provinces of Minya and Assiut south of Cairo.
Egypt’s Christians have had a somewhat turbulent history in the Muslim majority Arab nation, with the community occasionally suffering outright persecution but generally living in peace with their Muslim compatriots. But radical Muslims who have first emerged in the 1970s have whipped up anti-Christian sentiments, something that has, in turn, led to an upsurge in attacks against their places of worship, church-linked facilities as well as their businesses and homes.
More recently, ISIS has vowed to go after the Christians, claiming responsibility for a series of attacks against churches packed with worshippers starting December 2016.
The discrimination many Christians complain about and the shift towards religious conservatism by many Egyptian Muslims over the last 50 years have forced hundreds of thousands of Christians to migrate, starting new lives in growing communities in places as far afield as Australia, Canada and the United States.
Here is a look at major attacks against Egypt's Coptic Christians in recent years:
November 2: Masked gunmen riding pickup trucks opened fire on three buses carrying pilgrims to the remote desert monastery of St. Samuel the Confessor south of Cairo, killing 7 and wounding about 20. IS claimed responsibility for the attack.
May 26, 2017: Masked militants riding in three all-terrain cars open fire on a bus carrying pilgrims on their way to the Monastery of St. Samuel the Confessor, killing 29 and wounding 22. ISIS claimed responsibility for the attack.
April 2017: Twin attacks by suicide bombers hit churches in the coastal city of Alexandria and the Nile Delta city of Tanta. At least 43 people are killed and scores of worshippers injured in the Palm Sunday attack, which narrowly missed a ceremony presided over by Pope Tawadros II, spiritual leader of Egypt Orthodox Copts, in Alexandria's St. Mark's Cathedral. ISIS claimed responsibility for the attacks.
February 2017: Hundreds of Egyptian Christians flee their homes in the northern part of the Sinai Peninsula, fearing attacks by ISIS. The group's North Sinai affiliate had killed at least seven Coptic Christians in the restive peninsula in less than a month.
December 2016: A bombing at a chapel adjacent to Egypt's main Coptic Christian cathedral in Cairo kills 30 people and wounds dozens during Sunday Mass in one of the deadliest attacks carried out against the religious minority in recent memory. ISIS claimed responsibility.
July 2016: Pope Tawadros II says that since 2013 there were 37 sectarian attacks on Christians in Egypt, nearly one incident a month. A Muslim mob stabs to death a 27-year-old Coptic Christian man, Fam Khalaf, in the central city of Minya over a personal feud.
May 2016: A Muslim mob ransacks and torches seven Christian homes in Minya after rumours spread that a Christian man had an affair with a Muslim woman. The elderly mother of the Christian man was stripped naked and dragged through a street by the mob.
New Year's Eve 2011: A bomb explodes in a Coptic Christian church in Alexandria as worshippers leave after a midnight mass, killing more than 20 people.
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Thursday, November 7 – UAE v Oman
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The Uefa Awards winners
Uefa Men's Player of the Year: Virgil van Dijk (Liverpool)
Uefa Women's Player of the Year: Lucy Bronze (Lyon)
Best players of the 2018/19 Uefa Champions League
Goalkeeper: Alisson (Liverpool)
Defender: Virgil van Dijk (Liverpool)
Midfielder: Frenkie de Jong (Ajax)
Forward: Lionel Messi (Barcelona)
Uefa President's Award: Eric Cantona
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