FOOTBALL – A NEW-LOOK 28-player squad has been called up for the annual summer training camp of Bahrain’s senior men’s football national team.
The team list for their overseas gathering was announced yesterday by the Bahrain Football Association (BFA).
The nationals are scheduled to hold their camp in Maribor, Slovenia, from July 10 to 24.
Head coach Dragan Talajic has selected a majority of the kingdom’s international regulars for this training gathering, but has also included a number of fresh names to replace some of their veteran or unavailable players.
Among those left out are top star Mohammed Jassim Marhoon, who has club commitments during the same period, as well as talented up-and-coming forward Sayed Ahmed Alwadaie, who has international duty with Bahrain’s under-23 Olympic team.
Bahrain’s most-capped international goalkeeper Sayed Mohammed Jaafar, will also not be joining the squad at the camp, along with fellow-long serving national team standouts Ismaeel Abdullatif, Ali Haram, and Mohammed Al Rumaihi.
The new selections include Abdulla Al Subaie, Hussain Jameel, Omar Saber, Ahmed Dhiya, Ahmed Abdulhameed, and goalkeepers Yousef Habib and Mohammed Al Gharabli. Some of them had been called up in the past, but all have yet to play a game with the senior men’s national team, a national team official told the GDN.
Habib was with Bahrain in the AFC Asian Cup in 2019, while Saber was in a Thailand camp in 2022. Jameel joined a camp in Serbia in 2023, while Abdulhameed was with the nationals during their overseas camp last year, also held in Slovenia.
Amongst Bahrain’s star players Talajic has kept on the team are Waleed Al Hayyam, Amine Benaddi, Hamad Shamsan, Abdulla Al Khalasi, Sayed Dhiya Saeed, Komail Alaswad, Ali Madan, Mahdi Humaidan, Mahdi Abduljabbar, and goalkeeper Ebrahim Luthfallah.
The rest of the roster features Sayed Mahdi Baqer, Ahmed Bughammar, Sayed Mahmood Al Mosawi, Hazza Ali, Vincent Emmanuel, Hussain Al Eker, Jassim Al Shaikh, Ahmed Al Sherooqi, Ebrahim Al Khattal, Hussain Abdulkarim, and goalkeeper Abdulkarim Al Fardan.
According to a team official, the nationals will no longer be gathering locally ahead of their camp and will fly straight to Maribor, where they are expected to play a series of friendly games against local opposition.
Bahrain are preparing for a number of upcoming competitions set to take place later this year, including the Fifa Arab Cup 2025 this December in Doha, Qatar.
The nationals must first play a qualifying game in November against Djibouti to secure their spot in the Fifa Arab Cup’s group stage. The date and venue of the single-game contest has yet to be announced.
Should the Bahrainis win, they will be in Group D for the tournament proper, where they will join Algeria, Iraq, and either Lebanon or Sudan.
Group A features competition hosts Qatar, Tunisia, Syria or South Sudan, and Palestine or Libya; Group B is composed of Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Oman or Somalia, and Yemen or Comoros; and Group C includes Egypt, Jordan, the UAE, and either Kuwait or Mauritania.
Bahrain’s senior men’s football national team have had a mixed 2025 so far. They started the year winning the 26th Gulf Cup – their second-ever title in the history of the regional competition – but then followed it up with a heart-breaking exit from the Asian qualifiers for the Fifa World Cup 2026.
patrick@gdnmedia.bh
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