Jordan faces Colombia in a final friendly in preparation for the 2026 World Cup

The Jordanian national team aspires to regain confidence and achieve many technical and moral gains when it faces Colombia in a final friendly match, in preparation for the 2026 FIFA World Cup.

Jordan will meet Colombia at Snapdragon Stadium in San Diego, USA, at two o’clock in the morning on Monday, local time in the Jordanian capital, Amman.

Moroccan coach Jamal Salami’s goal will be to achieve a positive result, after a wave of criticism due to the friendly loss to Switzerland 4-1 last Sunday.

But Salami then downplayed the impact of the loss in press statements, in which he indicated that there was still an opportunity to correct the mistakes.

The Moroccan coach’s team suffered a major blow after young striker Ibrahim Sabra suffered a tear in the ankle ligaments in his left foot on Friday in the team’s group training, and was excluded from the Nashama roster after he was the most prominent candidate to compensate for the absence of top scorer Yazan Al-Naimat, who is also absent due to injury.

Musa Al-Taamari leads the Jordanian national team attack, in addition to relying on the duo Ali Alwan and Mahmoud Mardi, and in the midfield Nizar Al-Rashdan, Nour Al-Rawabdeh and Muhannad Abu Taha, and the defense quartet Yazan Al-Arab, Ihsan Haddad, Saad Al-Rousan and Muhammad Abu Al-Nadi, and behind them is goalkeeper Yazid Abu Laila.

This match may constitute an opportunity to appear against a group of substitute players, most notably Odeh Al-Fakhouri, who scored his first international goal against Switzerland after coming on as a substitute at the beginning of the second half, and Muhammad Abu Zureiq, nicknamed “Sharara,” along with Amer Abu Jamous, Ali Azaizeh, Muhammad Al-Dawoud, Ibrahim Saada, and Rajai Ayed.

The Colombian national team has high hopes for its star player, Luis Dias, the German striker from Bayern Munich, and the team’s veteran captain, James Rodriguez, the Mexican midfielder from Lyon, in his seventh participation in the World Cup and after failing to qualify for the previous World Cup in 2022 in Qatar.

Colombia coach Nestor Lourenco said, “The Jordanian team is good and qualified from a highly competitive geographical area, and I want to win this match.”

He added, “We have to know how to direct it, but the most important thing is to find solutions and methods that lead us to victory, and this is the real challenge in this match in particular.”

The two teams previously met once in 2014 in a friendly match in which Colombia won 3-0.