Sam on Sunday's opener

Sam Schweingruber, courtesy of Masayori Ishikawa

Phnom Penh Crown kick-off their Metfone C-League campaign tomorrow evening against Asia Euro University at 6pm at Olympic Stadium. The teams have met 5 times in pre-season friendlies. Here's what head coach Sam Schweingruber had to say:
"AEU is never an easy game... the last 4 games we won each of them but we have never managed to keep a cleen sheet, so they always manage to score... 2 times from a set piece, so we must be careful with the free-kicks that we might give away, or hopefully not. We expect them to defend very compact and fight hard. Despite the team ending up in 9th place last season, they only conceded 4 times more than 2 goals in a game, so we have to be on our best to score and win our opening match."

On the overall strength of his squad for the 2014 season, the head coach said this:
"We have more strength in depth and start from the beginning of the season well prepared. We had enough time to work on the core group of players and added a few more foreigners. So we know we are stronger than last year- but we also understand that our opposition is stronger than last year and we are looking forward to a good challenge this year."