AFC Proposes New Dates for the Postponed World Cup Qualifiers
Asian Football Confederation has proposed new dates for the FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022 and AFC Asian Cup China 2023 Asian Qualifiers that were supposed to take place in March and June 2020.
AFC was forced to postpone the qualifiers due to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic across the world. Now that the world is limping back to normalcy, AFC has released the new dates for the qualifiers.
Matchdays 7 and 8 that were postponed will now take place on October 8 and 13 and Matchdays 9 and 10 will take place on November 12 and 17, 2020.
According to the latest schedule released by the AFC, the following are the match dates for India.
- 08 – October 2020 – India vs Qatar
- 12 – November 2020 – Bangladesh vs India
- 17 – November 2020 – India vs Afghanistan
India’s last world cup qualifier was played on 19 November 2019 against Oman in a away tie which they lost by 1-0. The home tie against Qatar which was supposed to take place on 26 – March -2020 was scheduled at the Kalinga stadium in Bhubaneswar. Now, with the rescheduled dates, we will have to wait for the All India Football Federation to announce the new venue.
The Asian Football Confederation press note regarding the proposed new dates have also mentioned that the AFC will continue to monitor COVID-19 situation in its respective member countries and will notify the member associations if there is a need to reassess the match schedules due to the ever-present COVID-19 threat. They have also mentioned that they have come out and announced these dates with a view to complete the Preliminary Joint Qualification Round 2 by November 2020.
With COVID-19 posing a considerable threat in India even today, it will have to be seen how the plans of AFC to conduct the World Cup/ Asian Cup qualifiers will pan out. We will keep you updated on the latest developments in the coming days/months.