Al-Ittihad kept their run moving on Tuesday with a 2-1 win over Al-Fayha at Al-Inma Stadium in Jeddah, but Jens Wissing made clear the result came with a cost. He said the team were still carrying the strain of their 2-1 victory over Al-Nassr just days earlier, and that the schedule was already testing how long they could keep up the pace.
That mattered because the win came in the sixth round of the Saudi Roshn League and left Al-Ittihad third with 14 points, one behind Al-Hilal and Al-Qadsiah. It also followed a tense stretch in which the squad had to turn around from one league battle to another without much recovery time, the kind of run that can expose whether a side is winning because it is fresh or because it is finding ways through fatigue.
Wissing did not hide that the first half was not clean. He said the team did not turn good chances into goals, then grew more dangerous after the break and improved in several areas. Even so, he kept coming back to the same point: the full points were what counted. For him, the result mattered more than the polish.
The coach also pointed to the bench as part of the answer. He said he wanted to finish the encounter when Youssef En-Nesyri came on, and that he believed Al-Ittihad could score once the striker entered the match. He added that En-Nesyri’s work without the ball mattered too, a reminder that the closing stages were shaped as much by control as by attack.
That is where the friction sits. Wissing said the team’s fitness level does not currently allow it to play at a high tempo every three days, and that the schedule makes it important for everyone to play. He said he studies all the options, believes in every player and does not judge Georginio Wijnaldum only by position. Wijnaldum, he said, is an important addition: intelligent, hungry, a leader, and someone he had already spoken to directly.
Al-Ittihad have now won four of their six Roshn League matches and drawn the other two, a start that keeps them in the title conversation even while the coach is still managing the limits of the squad. What comes next is less about the 2-1 scoreline than about whether Wissing can keep rotating without losing the edge that has carried his team to third place.
