Men's Football AFC Under 23 Asian Championship 2020

Totallympics · March 1, 2019

Men's Football AFC Under 23 Asian Championship 2020

Various Cities (THA) - 8 January 2020 - 26 January 2020

Official Website

MHSN · March 23, 2019

The qualifiers already started in 11 groups. another crazy format by "AFC" ! group winners + 4 best 2nd placers + host Thailand qualify for the final tournament. which is totally unfair since groups are highly unbalanced. and since as usual one team withdraws (this time Pakistan) we have a group of 3 teams which means only results against 1st and 3rd teams in the groups will be counted for the best 2nd placed teams.

another crazy thing about this competition is playing 3 matches in 5 days ! :facepalm: the whole system is unfair, for example in East Asian Groups, 2nd/3rd tier teams are much weaker comparing to the west. we had some big scores yesterday. 8-0 or 7-0 but on other hand because of the time difference West Asian teams will play "after" the East Asian groups. so some teams will know what they need to qualify at least as one of the best 2nd placers. top two teams in each group mostly play the last group match. imagine if they know with a draw both teams can qualify. :mumble:

Iran looked really disappointing in first match vs Turkmenistan, I really don't think this team can qualify for the Olympics. they are missing some players though I just hope they can somehow qualify with Iraq (I can't see this team beating Iraq to be honest) then they have time to improve for the final tournament. 4 years ago we had a much much better team (most of our current NT members) but a terrible coach ruined their chance. this time it seems the coaching looks fine but this group of players don't look talented to me.

MHSN · March 26, 2019

at the end all Asian notable teams made it to the final round but we had lots of "suspecting" results in last matchday. this format is terrible and unfair.

in 7 out of 11 groups the last match between the best two teams ended up in a draw !!! :yikes: and in other 4 groups, in one of them the best two teams didn't play in last day, in another one Thailand (the host team pre-qualified) was involved and didn't care about the qualification and in another one Japan-Myanmar was too much one-sided to finish in a draw. Japan won 7-0. so in fact only one of those 8 matches in last day didn't finish in a tie. (between Bahrain and Palestine) I'm not saying all of those matches were fixed, of course not. some of them were VERY suspicious though. for example Jordan-Syria was 0-0 and then both teams scored one goal in last 10 minutes which qualified both of them. or in Uzbekistan-Tajikistan the last 20 minutes were a joke .both teams were just wasting time. the same happened in KSA/UAE match , this one was more than just "suspicious" that was the last match of the competition and they both knew just a 1-1 draw will be enough for both of them (even 0-0 wasn't enough) and 1-1 just happened

the only match wasn't fixed for sure was Iran-Iraq, not because our football is clean, but because our officials are extremely stupid. Tajik-Uzbek match finished few minutes before the start of our match and because of that 0-0. I knew even a 0-0 draw will be enough for Iran but apparently nobody else knew that ! :facepalm: actually Iran tried really hard and missed so many chances. they also risked a lot in last 10-20 minutes and gave so many counter attacks to Iraq but Iraq was just interested in time wasting and gross rolling. and some of our players were even crying after the final whistle ! all news websites in Iran didn't know we are already qualified.

Edited March 26, 2019 by MHSN