Pan Gon to make several changes against Papua New Guinea

KUALA NERUS - After beating the Solomon Islands 4-1 recently, national team Head Coach Kim Pan Gon is set to make several changes when facing Papua New Guinea in a Tier 1 international friendly at the Sultan Mizan Zainal Abidin Stadium here, tomorrow night.

Pan Gon, who considers tomorrow's match as an experiment, said the changes in the Harimau Malaya’s starting line up among other things are to see the level of performance of the players who did not play in the last match.

What’s more, the South Korean wants the competition among the players to continue to increase in his efforts to form the best squad, especially ahead of the 2023 Asian Cup in Qatar in January next year.

"I want to make them (players) keep competing with each other, I want to make them feel that there is no fixed first eleven, anyone can be in the first eleven, this kind of environment I like.

"Now we have two players for one position so hopefully we can put three, so everybody must fight each other for the spot in the first eleven and when we give them a chance to play they must show us that they are better than another player in that position,” he told the pre-match press conference here, today.

Despite the changes he will make, Pan Gon is keen to see his side continue to apply the team’s philosophy, being aggressive and controlling the entire match, besides reducing technical errors.

"We must get used to creating our own goal scoring chances and forcing our opponent to make errors...we must also reduce our small technical mistakes so that we can give a better game than the last one,” he said while confirming that most of his players are fit for tomorrow’s clash.

Tomorrow's match is Malaysia's second Tier 1 international friendly here after defeating the Solomon Islands, last Wednesday.

Based on the statistics against Papua New Guinea, Malaysia have won three of four matches with the last meeting in 2016 seeing the Harimau Malaya win 2-1, five months after losing 0-2 to the same opponents, but Pan Gon did not care about the past records.

"We saw they (Papua New Guinea) play against Singapore and they were better than we expected. I don’t care about history, we are looking for consecutive wins at home, create our winning habit and build our own fortress at home, that is our main target,” Pan Gon said.

Meanwhile, defender Corbin Ong said his teammates were more focused on the team's efforts to reach the best level of play than thinking about the opponent.

"I think (at) this camp we are more focused on how we are going to play, how we want to attack and defend, so that’s all that matters.

"It’s going to be a completely different game, like the coach said our focus is on the characteristics, we want to be aggressive and be dominant and at the same time we want to reduce our mistakes. So instead of talking about Papua New Guinea we focus on how we can better ourselves as a squad,” he said.

Based on the world rankings, Malaysia are ranked 138th while Papua New Guinea 159th. - BERNAMA