June 18th, 2023: This week in Palestinian Football

Palestine draws Indonesia in front of 45,000 fans, Olympic Team goes undefeated in the WAFF Championship, and Musab Al-Battat comes home.

Final thoughts on Palestine draw vs. Indonesia

A much anticipated encounter- the friendly against Indonesia- ended on something of a sour note. Palestine’s 0-0 draw featured only one real scoring chance to speak of and if not for the heroics of Rami Hamadi in goal Palestine would have most certainly lost a match to opposition ranked 56 places below them.

Friendlies are of course just that, friendlies. These games do not count. They are for testing and tinkering but with so few matches being played by Palestine on a yearly basis. Consider that in the last two years Palestine has played 11 matches while their rivals Jordan have played twice that amount. In that timeframe, Makram Dabboub has only had four friendlies his Jordanian counterpart has had fifteen.

The scarcity of friendlies means they take on an outsized importance to the supporters who were none too happy about the result. So let’s try to put some things into perspective.

First let’s start with the neagatives. This was not a good performance. Palestine had one shot on target, Indonesia had six. Indonesia outpossessed Palestine 59-41. Palestine did not win their first corner until the 49th minute of the match. To make matters worse the team could not break down Indonesia’s defence and started pumping crosses into the box. They completed a paltry one out of sixteen.