Abu Dhabi: The AFC Asian Cup UAE 2019 has been a testament to the competition pathway and the development investment made by the Asian Football Confederation (AFC) in the last few years, according to the early observations by the AFC’s Technical Study Group (TSG).



The TSG have observed all 48 matches played so far and have identified, not only the progress made by many of the countries competing, but also the consistency of trends between the AFC Asian Cup UAE 2019 and the FIFA World Cup played in Russia last year.

Technical observers were quick to recognise early dividends on AFC’s investment in development, such as Vietnam’s achievement of reaching the quarter-finals with more than half of the squad that had finished as runners-up at the AFC U23 Championship in China only a year ago.



Reinforcing the trend, Qatar striker Almoez Ali, top scorer at that same tournament in 2018 is now leading the scoring charts at this AFC Asian Cup.

Vietnam, along with other contenders such as Thailand, Jordan and Kyrgyz Republic received due credit from the Technical group for demonstrating that they could be competitive at continental level.

The TSG were also quick to recognise the trend from the 2018 FIFA World Cup with more than 33 percent of goals coming from set plays and the fact that, as in Russia, most coaches in the final eight placed an emphasis on keeping formations compact and tactically efficient collective units.

Within weeks of Friday’s AFC Asian Cup final in Abu Dhabi, national team coaches and technical directors of all the AFC Member Associations will gather in Kuala Lumpur for a conference to follow-up on coaching trends and some of the main tendencies to emerge from the 51 games played at the final tournament.

And this cascading of information will then extend into the AFC Coach Education Conference to be staged in mid-April 2019. All of which dovetails neatly into the long-term Vision and Mission development programme put into place by AFC President Shaikh Salman bin Ebrahim Al Khalifa as well as the AFC’s extra investment in Technical staff for its Member Associations.

The complete findings from the AFC Asian Cup will be published in the Tournament Technical Report, which will be available in both printed and online formats.


Source: the-afc.com