April 4 : Wins over England and Scotland underline Japan’s status as the Asian nation most likely to make a major impact at the World Cup during an international window of mixed fortunes for the continent’s qualifiers for this summer’s finals.
Iraq’s emotional 2-1 victory over Bolivia during the intercontinental playoffs in Mexico took the Gulf state to the World Cup for the first time in 40 years and ensured Asia would have a record nine qualifiers at the tournament.
But while Graham Arnold and his players were celebrating the completion of a qualifying journey that lasted 21 matches over 28 months, the continent’s eight other finalists experienced varying levels of satisfaction with their preparations.
The Japanese took the headlines with their 1-0 wins at Hampden Park and Wembley, the first over England by an Asian nation, to give coach Hajime Moriyasu increased belief his team can be among the World Cup contenders.
“Come the World Cup, we must be able to do many things, we must have many styles of play,” said Moriyasu, whose side have won their last five matches and who will face the Netherlands, Sweden and Tunisia at the finals.
“Offensively we must be able to attack slowly as well as attacking on the counterattack, which will be faster offensively.
“We saw against Scotland, they played a very defensive style and we saw England play with a very high-pressing team so we have to manage the play against various types of opponent and I’m confident that we can do that at the World Cup as well.”
South Korean coach Hong Myung-bo was left with plenty to ponder after a pair of defeats, as Tuesday’s 1-0 loss against Austria came in the wake of a 4-0 thrashing by Ivory Coast.
“We’ve finished our experiments in terms of our positional balance and player combinations,” said Hong, whose team will meet co-hosts Mexico, South Africa and Czech Republic.
“Our tactics are almost set. We have to finish our player selection by mid-May, and we will watch K-League matches closely and analyse our data to pick the players that we think will perform well at the World Cup.”
Australia won back-to-back clashes with Cameroon and Curacao in FIFA Series matches in Sydney and Melbourne, while Uzbekistan, preparing for their first World Cup appearance, won 3-1 against Gabon before sealing a penalty shootout win over Venezuela.
Jordan, who will also be making their World Cup debut, picked up morale-boosting 2-2 draws against Costa Rica and Nigeria, and Iran lost 2-1 to the Nigerians before winning 5-0 against Costa Rica.
The position of Saudi Arabia coach Herve Renard is under renewed scrutiny in the aftermath of a 4-0 loss against Egypt and Tuesday’s 2-1 defeat to Serbia while Qatar’s scheduled warm-up matches were cancelled due to the ongoing Gulf conflict.
