Asian WC Qualifying Wrap: March 28–29

This weekend’s matches in Asia pro­vided fur­ther proof that there is some high qual­ity, dra­matic foot­ball being played in Asia.  The race for 3rd place in Group 1 just got more inter­est­ing as Uzbek­istan moved into a 3-way tie with Qatar and Bahrain.  Uzbek­istan rose above the Qatar defense for a crush­ing 4–0 home win.  Uzbeks were led by Farhod Tadjiev’s hat trick.  The for­ward notched a hat trick using his head to score his 3 goals and put Borat’s most hated rival in 3rd place in Group 1 ahead of Bahrain & Qatar on goal differential.

The big, news mak­ing result from Asia this week­end came from Tehran where Iran gave up 2 goals in the last 12 min­utes of the match to lose to Saudi Ara­bia 2–1 at Azadi Sta­dium.  Iran took the lead when Osasuna’s Masoud Shojaei’s well placed shot beat Saudi keeper Walleed Ali in the 57th minute to give Team Melli the 1–0 lead.

As the Ira­ni­ans seemed con­tent to sit on the lead the Saudis attacked and in the 78th minute Al-Hilal mid­fielder Naif Haz­azi slot­ted a well placed through ball past Iran keeper Seyed Rah­mati for the equal­izer. Then in the 86th minute off a cor­ner kick defender Osama Al-Harbi beat his marker and headed in the game win­ner into the far post side net.  The Green Fal­cons stun­ning vic­tory puts them in 3rd place in Group 2 with 7 points.

As for Iran, they still have a chance but the loss made their path to South Africa a lot more dif­fi­cult.  Team Melli is in 4th place with 6 points hav­ing only 1 win in their 5 final stage qual­i­fy­ing matches.  To make mat­ters worse, depend­ing on your per­spec­tive, the Iran­ian Foot­ball Fed­er­a­tion fired Ali Daei as their coach.  The leg­endary player has strug­gled as head coach of Iran. Some ques­tion­able player choices and the loss to Saudi Ara­bia made Daei a vic­tim of the ax.

Check out the high­lights from the Iran-Saudi Ara­bia match:

Iran vs. Saudi Ara­bia Highlights

Here are the results & stand­ings from this weekend’s Asian World Cup qualifiers:

Group 1
Uzbek­istan 4 — 0 Qatar
UZB: Farhod Tad­jiyev (34′, 45′+3, 53′) & Anvar­jon Soliev (61′)

Japan 1 — 0 Bahrain
JAP: Shun­suke Naka­mura (47′)

GROUP 1 STANDINGS

Group 2
Korea DPR (N. Korea) 2 — 0 United Arab Emi­rates
DPR: Pak Nam Chol (51′) & Mun In Guk (90′+3)

Iran 1 — 2 Saudi Ara­bia
IRN: Masoud Sho­jaei (57′)
KSA: Naif Haz­azi (78′) & Osama Al Harbi (86′)

GROUP 2 STANDINGS

Tagged as: Asia, Qualifiers, World Cup