The President of AFA, Armand Duka, in an interview with Top Channel with journalist Endi Tufa, spoke about the preparations and the importance of the match against Serbia, a game awaited with great interest by the sports public.
The head of the Albanian football government emphasized that the main goal is to achieve a positive result, by playing a fair match and in the spirit of sporting competition.
Also, President Duka commented on the process of ticket distribution through a computerized lottery, guaranteeing full transparency and adherence to UEFA standards.
Below is the full interview of President Duka for Top Channel:
The match against Serbia? – Our task is to organize it well, to play well and to get 3 points. I have also told the leaders of the Serbian Football Asociation that we will prepare the match as such and they will come here as a sporting opponent and nothing more. I believe there will be a sporting atmosphere, but certainly fought for sportingly.
Pressure on the players? – We are all human beings and so are the players, who are influenced by the environment. We will try our best to separate the sporting part from all non-sporting emotions. What I tell the players or anyone is that in this situation your job is to do well what you have been asked and charged with, football. If we win a football match, anyone can see it however they want, but you have to win once, because once we win it is a kind of abstraction that anyone sees it as they want, but the good thing is to win it.
Is this like a final for us, for our objective which is second place in the group? – A positive result, 3 points in this match, really gives us many reasons and hope to continue and aim for second place. If it goes otherwise, things get difficult. But this does not mean that even if we win the match, we secure second place.
How do you think we can win this match against Serbia? – We cannot measure ourselves simply by individual sporting qualities. Serbia in its lineup has very good qualities, players in strong teams, economically valued in the football market with high figures, but to unite them together and make a team, I think we have a better team.
In a match with such interest, why was the computerized lottery method used? – When the demand is 20 times or 30 times greater, certainly everything would be suspicious, but I assure you it is a random draw done by the system itself and this draw and system is the same used by UEFA for European Championship or Champions League matches for tickets sold publicly. If we were to issue them online without a lottery, it could have been even more criticized, or people would have to stay in front of their computers for hours, while this way we considered it a more suitable and better thing for this match.
