World Cup qualifications a main goal for Egypt: Bradley

It has been a little over a year since Bob Bradley took over the coaching position of the Egyptian national football team, on Oct. 15, 2011.

In an interview with Al Arabiya, the American remained headstrong in dealing with the challenges affecting his team in a country marred by political and security instability, which led to the suspension of the local league.

“It's very challenging; certainly it’s not the best situation for the players. They need games, they need a league, they need to feel like they are moving themselves along in their careers, but we've always had an attitude that we've gotta find a way when we get together, to enjoy the work, to have a vision, and that's what we're trying to do - every time,” he said.

The suspension of the league followed the Port Said stadium incident, where a riot escalated violently resulting in the death of about 80 people, costly damages and civilian injuries.

As a result, Egypt will not play in any competitive matches until March next year, when it hosts Zimbabwe in a World Cup qualifying match. But that is not an excuse for training to stop.

While victories come from team effort, Bradley says he assesses his players on an individual level.

“These months are when we must continue to work. We worked very hard in February, March, April, and May for the beginning of World Cup qualifying in June and we made progress, and now we have a period, where we must, again, prove. We can't be the same team next March that we were in June. That's not good enough. So we work, we try to bring in some new players, we keep trying to establish our ideas on how we play as a team and it's very important,” he said.

Despite that Bradley’s career with Egypt began on a loss against Brazil in a friendly in November last year, his team is still on the path to qualifying for the World Cup in 2014.

“I have an opportunity to work with some great players, with some teams that accomplished a lot, and now we have a big goal in Egypt,” he said.