Singapore, October 30: PKR Svay Rieng FC head coach Matt McConkey may be new to the role at the helm of the Cambodia Premier League champions, but he is not prepared to compromise his values when the ASEAN Club Championship Shopee Cup™ resumes in December.
The 32-year-old was appointed during the close season following the departure of Pep Muñoz and the Northern Irishman is looking to build on the successes of his former boss at ASEAN’s premier club competition.
“The Shopee Cup™ is a tournament we’ve wanted to do a bit better in than we did last year,” says McConkey, who worked as Muñoz’s assistant when Svay Rieng reached the final of the AFC Challenge League and retained the Cambodia Premier League title.
“The quality in the competition from last year to this year has definitely increased, especially with the addition of Johor Darul Ta’zim FC and by adding an extra Thai team to the line-up.
“It’s a reason we don’t want to go and play a different way to how we normally play, because then you’re not really getting a true reflection of who we are.
“You can sit deep and try to hold yourself and try to reduce their chances and let them have the ball and lose 2-0 as opposed to going and trying to do what you normally do, try and be aggressive and try to create space higher up the pitch to attack and maybe lose 4-0.”
Authenticity is important to McConkey, who has been with Svay Rieng since 2021 before working his way through the coaching ranks to take over the top job, and who comes from a family steeped in the sport.
For more than three decades, his father, Harry, has been a stalwart of the domestic leagues in Northern Ireland, both as a player and coach, while his elder brother, Mark, played for the family’s hometown team, Ballinamallard United.
Matt made an early move into coaching, working at community level in Liverpool during his early 20s before returning home to study for a Master’s degree and then, during the COVID-19 pandemic, making the move to Cambodia.
He spent an initial 18 months working as assistant to Conor Nestor before his departure to Hyderabad in the Indian Super League led to the arrival of Muñoz and the start of a golden era for Svay Rieng.
“We had similar views around how the team should play and how the first team should be run,” McConkey says of his partnership with the Spaniard.
“It was good with Pep, and obviously we were very successful with winning the league in the first year and then in the second season we got to the final of AFC Challenge League.
“That was amazing. There were 60,000 in the stadium and the players were maybe a little bit rattled in the first five, 10 minutes because it was so new for a lot of them. It was a big achievement.”
Muñoz’s departure for Chinese Super League side Shenzhen Peng City FC in July saw McConkey promoted and he is now looking to build on the previous season’s achievements.
“Last year the philosophy was very clear,” he says. “Pep came in and he had his schooling in Barcelona, so the main ideas are there in how we want to keep the ball and how we want to press as much as we can and control the game with the ball rather than without.
“For me, I’m kind of the same idea probably with a bit more focus on being aggressive without the ball and we’ll probably try to take that one step further this year than we did last year.
“We don’t want to play where we sit in two banks of four and try to nick something on the counter-attack, we don’t want to do it that way because, for me as a coach, it’s been done before. It’s what’s expected of you.”
Svay Rieng have remodelled their squad since hitting the heights in the 2024/25 campaign with Brazilian forward Cristian Roque being one of the few survivors from last season’s side while the likes of Kwame Peprah and Patrick, another Brazilian, have been signed.
The club have made a solid start to their 2025/26 Shopee Cup™ campaign, picking up a 3-0 win over Shan United FC from Myanmar in their opener before slipping to a narrow 2-1 loss to Nam Định FC on Matchday Two.
Those results put Svay Rieng in second place in Group B ahead of their meeting with JDT on Matchday Three on December 4 in Phnom Penh with McConkey determined to stick to his principles in the clash with the Malaysia Super League champions.
“I just don’t see the point,” he says of the possibility that his side will adopt a more defensive approach.
“You don’t learn in terms of going forward. If we want to keep doing this, we have to be better on transitions or be better with distances in our backline when we’re high up the pitch or whatever it is.
“If we sit deep and at the end of the game we go: Well, they have a lot of quality and they’re a better team than us, it just doesn’t really work for me.
“This game will be a good barometer of where the club’s at, but it’s also a good barometer of what our game model is and the quality that we have in terms of players as well. It is important to me that we try and do it that way.
“Maybe some of the other coaching staff will be looking at me and questioning my sanity because we’re going to go and press JDT man-to-man. They’ll probably be looking at me like I’m nuts, but I won’t compromise that.”
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