Henk ten Cate is a former Chelsea and Barcelona assistant coach who led Ajax to the Dutch Cup in 2007.
He steered Al Jazira to a President’s Cup win against Al Ain in May – the Pride of Abu Dhabi’s first trophy in four seasons. He was talking to Sport360 reporter Matthew Jones.
I signed a new two-year deal at Al Jazira this summer. I’m happy here. If I wasn’t happy I wouldn’t have signed, that’s for sure.
My future is not important. The future of the club, that is always more important than any individual, whether a coach or player. I like to focus on the game rather than my own situation.
Looking ahead to this season, I think we can have a very good team. We can compete with the best. Whether it’s enough to win something that’s in the future and you never know, but I’m sure that with players still coming in and the way we’ve worked in pre-season, in our training camps in Germany and the Netherlands, and the fitness of the team, we can have a good season. The players have done a good job during pre-season and the balance in the team is good, and this is important.
At the end of last season we were playing very well and with a lot of confidence and then of course we won the President’s Cup. We look at the positive things last season brought us, and one of the main positive things was we used a lot of young players.
Some of them played an important role in the team, which I’m very happy with, and so is the club. These young players helped bring us to the final. We gave them a chance to play, to gain experience, and the club has been provided with a good group of young players who are able to compete at this level. I’m very happy with this. I like to work with young players, they’re hungry and eager to show something, so out of the bad situation the club was in, a good thing came.
@AlJazira_uae signing Boussoufa unveiled in #AbuDhabi , excited to work under Henk Ten Cate @Sport360 pic.twitter.com/J4uvhNzVxm
— Denzil M Pinto (@denz_360) August 29, 2016
Mohamed Jamal, for me, is a certainty to start this season. If Jamal is here [mentally], connected, he’s a very good midfield player, a player I like and who we need. Yaqoub Yousef has made great strides and Salem Ali too is really good. He can play in numerous positions. He has come back from three knee operations, too. What he needs is a lot of minutes, so every opportunity I see for him to play, wherever it is, I give him a chance because I think he’s a good player.
There were games last season where we only played one foreign player, because I believe in the local players. What I do is look on a daily basis at the performance level of all the players. If local players are performing better I play local players.
We are still looking for two foreign players. We have Mbark Boussoufa and Jefferson Farfan occupying two of the four foreign player slots. I was really pleased with their performance throughout pre-season. As for the other two positions, we don’t know yet. We have to solve this problem, we are working on it. That’s the only thing I can say.
I’m not saying Park Jong-woo or Mirko Vucinic aren’t in my plans, but we are always looking to get better. If we can get better we will. It’s not like it was last year when I came into an existing team and couldn’t change anything. I have an idea of how I want us to play and I need players for this and this is what we are looking for. Players to fit into the system we want to play.
