Stuart John Hall: “We are going to Uzbekistan at the end of August where we will play two friendly games”

- What would you say about the training process of the national academy at this stage?

- We have the players for 20 days a month, and for 10 days, they're back with their families and with their clubs. In that time, most of them play three games in their clubs. So in the 20 days they're with us, we only look to play one or two games. Which means it may take longer to get to where we want to go, but we have to do that because we share the players with the clubs. Our goal is for players to play no more than five games a month including club matches. So we don't get overloaded players.

We also held theory coaching, as well as football intelligence workshops. 

Also included in the program are team building activities. It can be trips to matches, as, for example, we watched the game “Astana” against “Milsami” at the stadium. It can be a trip to the mountains, which we recently did. It is very important to hold such useful events for the team.

- How many players will be selected for the national academy and when the final list will be announced?

- We traveled all over Kazakhstan and watched more than 1300 players. Now we are still looking for some more players to strengthen our team. Earlier we announced the lineup and said that there would be changes. Probably one or two players will be added. We have been to a lot of cities, many competitions and tournaments and we plan to travel and watch games in August.

- What were the peculiarities of working with young players?

- When our players first came in, they did not know how to play on grass. Because most of them play on artificial turf. So when they came here, they had muscular problems because the grass is so demanding. So that was something that we had to look at, and now the guys are starting to get used to the grass. Because when you play your way through the international competition, 70-80% of those games will be on grass. 

- Kazakhstan U-15 has already played a few games. How important is the result of these matches?

- The results of the matches played are not really important at this stage, because the players are just learning, and the team is still in the formation stage.

- What are the team's plans for international matches and tournaments?

- We are copying the model from the top-20 countries in the world, the top 20 MAs in the world. So the player of those U-15 teams would play anything between  6 and 20 games in a year. At the moment I can see comfortably we can get to 10 games. This is fantastic to keep.

We have two games against Uzbekistan, where Uzbekistan will host us at the end of August. Then after that in September, in the FIFA dates, we have two games against Russia, here. And then in October, we're going to play in an international tournament.