Nearly there. First match in two weeks.
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Been quite a few big injuries to some of the big players. Mitoma out is a loss for Japan.
With Son & Hwang in good form the Koreans have to see this as a big opportunity.
Fuck Qatar.
Indeed. I don’t see myself doing anything else but watching the Australia games, just like the 2022 World Cup.
Hong Kong beat China in a warm-up game 
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Next minute Hong Kong withdraws from FIFA “voluntarily”.
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They beat themselves.
Also, the CCP don’t let you call it Hong Kong anymore. It’ now Hong Kong, China.
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The early games at the Asian cup are 1030pm I think, I might watch some of those. Can’t see myself doing any early AM group stage games at all though.
Depending on the fixture and day I might watch the knockout games
Being in this timezone is very handy sometimes.
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For anyone interested, the AFC website has a match predictor game.
Even if not doing it yourself, it’s interesting to see what predictions for each game has already been picked. (Gives you percentage scores of so far predictions for each game)
That the majority of games put 80% or more on one team, despite draw being in play, just says it all.
AFC needs to get more creative with the structures of these tournaments. Nobody wins from all of these foregone conclusion fixtures.
The Asian Cup shouldn’t be more than 16 teams, honestly. Maybe a 24-team competition is a political move to not only include more nations, but to make sure the bigger nations are less likely to exit at the group stage. It just means for the neutral that most people are not going to really tune in until the quarter finals, if at all.
You’ve gotta give the small teams a reason to care though, otherwise you just end up with the same teams everytime.
It’ll end up like test cricket.
Part of the AFC’s job is to try and help those associations improve their talent pool.
Part of the AFC’s job is also to ensure that their strongest teams are adequately prepared to represent AFC on the world stage.
And it completely fails at that right now.
With the current Asian Cup and the current WCQ format, your four-year-cycle can realistically yield an Asian Cup semi-final and World Cup qualification having lost your one game against a top-60 opponent, and having dropped a bunch of points against teams ranked 70, 80, 90, 100 in absurdly forgiving round-robin stages.
It’s completely fucked.
The Asian Cup should have seeded groups that pushes us to beat like Korea and Iran for direct passage to the semis.
There should be a Nations League where topping a group of Saudi/Australia/UAE/Uzbekhistan gets us direct WCQ passage, and frees up International Calendar dates from rubbish fixtures against Bangladesh and Turkmenistan.
We need competitive games against strong opposition with something on the line, and in the current cycle we get fuck all. We’re lucky if we get a couple in this tournament and then a couple more in the WCQ (where we qualify directly even if Japan spanks us twice, as long as we still finish above like UAE or China, or failing that if we top a subsequent group against like Oman and Vietnam or something).
But are their lobsters good enough to qualify?
Given they more than likely get their lobsters from us, I think we need Government intervention to ensure we only send the substandard lobsters to any AFC country.
“All that money, shit lobster you eat”
I only know the Asian cup is on due to this forum.
there has been so little publicity around this. with all the buzz around the Matildas (Kerr getting injured was headline news on TV and in the papers), you’d have thought that Football Australia might have tried to tap into that enthusiasm and popularity
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It’s pretty amazing that the tables have seemingly turned. Historically it would be the Matildas needing the popularity boost but that seems to have turned around, at least for the time being. Pretty cool, to be honest.