23 Mar 2019
Doha, 23 March 2019. Qatar U-23 national football team opened their campaign to reach AFC U-23 Championship Thailand 2020 finals with a 2-0 win over Afghanistan in Group A of the qualifiers match played on Friday night at Aspire Academy football fields. In the first match of the day featuring Oman against Nepal the former prevailed by 1-0 score-line. All but one of the players in Qatar U-23 side are Aspire graduates or affiliates and they overpowered Afghanistan with some smooth flowing football. Goals from graduate, Hassan Ahmad Palang after 13 minutes and a penalty converted by fellow graduate Abdullah al- Ahrak on 35th minute.
Speaking after the victory midfileder Mohamed Albiyati said, “Thank God we won. We made some mistakes during the match which we need to fix before the next game. It wasn’t an easy game and Afghanistan were tough. Hopefully next match we will improve. For the next two matches against Oman and Nepal we intend to win and seal qualification to the finals in Thailand”
Meanwhile one of the AFC Asian Cup winning stars, Tareq Salman who played in the game against Afghanistan said, “The game wasn’t easy nor hard either, but we knew little about Afghanistan before the encounter, so l would say we were sizing each other up and this affected our play. Our team is made up of players from different ages groups and we are still get used to play together as a team and be more aligned and l hopefully we will get it better in following games. Playing at Aspire is great for us because not only are we used to the environment but as graduates of Aspire we played on these fields for six years in competitions like Tri-Series and Al Kass International Cup and against other national teams so certainly is familiar territory for us”
Qatar will take on Nepal in their second game to be played on Sunday 24th March on pitch 5 Aspire Academy with kick off at 1900hrs