Young Lions vs Sengkang Punggol: Pre-match

The past few days had been comprehensively been kind to us, the long suffering fans of the Dolphins.
Prior to the home win on Thursday, the team was like a herd of bewildered Dolphins marooned in an ocean filled with unsympathetic sharks awaiting to savage on the poor, docile sea mammal like ourselves.
After being inflicted with many grotesque mauling, our badly mutilated Dolphins managed to restore some pride and parity.
Meanwhile the calves who took had been bullied around in their own league, had also unleashed their fury, coupling Thursday morale-boosting win with a stunning 5 goals display at Jalan Besat, against a Singapore U18 (last season Prime League champions no less).

What makes the victory sweeter is that those are the junior counterparts of the team we are facing tomorrow in the same venue.

The Young Lions, our nation de facto U23 team who were introduced to the league to further their education in professional football while building chemistry as a team before major tournament such as the Southeast Asian game at the tail end of 2009.
Last season squad was starting to show signs of frailty when several key members like talismanic striker Khairul Amri “graduated” from the squad.
The aftermath of his departure was a chronic lack of cutting edge up front which remains imminent this season with new gaffer, Terry Pathmanathan taking over from V Sundramoorthy.
Young guns like Khairul Nizam and Eugene Luo showed signs of promise when both scored against the national team in a pre-season friendly.
The former, a current Institute of Technical Education student was under the media glare since the word go and had opened account with a tap-in against DPMM in late February. The lack of fitness saw him putting in cameo roles since then.
The latter is regularly used on the wings, showed some promise but an uncut gem at best.

Before the end of the transfer window, the Young Lions was embroiled in a transfer saga over a young, lanky Chinese forward by the name of Yang Mu from Chinse Super League side, Changsha Ginde FC.
The transfer eventually went through with a speculated fee of $45K demanded by Yang’s former club.
The move drew much criticism from the netizens, claiming the money can be better used to groom home-grown players especially the purpose of the Cubs is nurture young Singapore talents for better things.
The 1.92m tall 19 years old (as we felt could be in the Qiu Li mold to assimilate into our FTS) didn’t take long to open his own account with a goal against Balestier Khalsa.
His height as well as that of captain and current top scorer (3 goals) Obadin Aikhena will pose the aerial pressure on us.
Their defense haven’t been too shabby and with the raw pace of the likes of fullback Irwan Shah and wingers Goh Swee Swee and Gabriel Quak; our leaky defense have to watch it.

However with the positive display on Thursday and the wealth of experience we have in our squad, we should at least take the game to the host on their astro-turf pitch.
Barring any last minute injury problem, the same starting eleven should start again and I would like to see our central midfield marshaled by the composed Noh Rahman and misfiring Abdoulaye having the slight edge since Young Lions missed their former skipper Isa Halim who had joined Home United this week.
They are also missing key midfield general Hariss Harun to long term injury which will also be advantageous to us.

We shared the points in 3 games against Young Lions last season with a goalless draw in the opening fixture, winning our first league game (under the rein of Saswadimata Dasuki) 3-2 at home then succumbing to a meek 0-2 loss with former Dolphin youngster Fairoz Hasan scoring in Jalan Besar.
A win will see us attaining at least 10th position for the first round of games regardless of the other scores but I wouldn’t mind a decent draw if the lads put in enough effort into the game.