The Asian Football Confederation has published the calendar of matches for the 18th Asian Cup 2023 qualification tournament, which will be held from 8 to 14 June 2022 in a centralized format with the participation of 24 teams divided into 6 qualifying groups.

The national team of Turkmenistan, as it became known after the draw held the day before in Kuala Lumpur, together with the teams of Bahrain, Malaysia and Bangladesh, formed the group "E", the games in which will be held at the Bukit Jalil stadium built in 1998, accommodating 87 thousand spectators.

The Turkmen team will play their first match on June 8 against the hosts of the tournament - the Malaysians.

The Malaysian national team, which the Turkmen footballers have not met before, currently occupies 154th place in the FIFA ranking. The 52-year-old Korean specialist Kim Pan-Gong, who previously worked with the youth and national teams of Hong Kong and a number of football clubs in Asia, will prepare this team for the 2023 Asian Cup qualifying tournament.

According to him, the upcoming match with the national team of Turkmenistan will be of decisive importance in the fight for tickets to the final part of the competition.

“I think that our opening game against Turkmenistan is the most important for us. In this game, we have to earn points,” said Kim Pan-Gon in an interview with the Malaysian media.

Most of the Malaysian national team players play in the national Super League. There are also two foreign players in the team: 25-year-old defender Dion Koles plays on loan for the Belgian Zulte Waregem, and 19-year-old striker Lukman Hakim Shamsudin is announced for the English Cardiff City.

Malaysian footballers played three times in the final tournament of the Asian Cup (in 1976, 1980 and 2007), but never went beyond the group stage.

The next opponent of the Turkmen team is the Bangladesh team, with which our players will play on June 11, in the FIFA rankings it ranks 186th. In the final part of the Asian Cup, the Bangladeshis played only once - back in 1980, then taking the last place in the group. The current squad of the Bangladesh national team, which has been coached by Spanish specialist Javier Cabrera since 2022, consists of players from local clubs. Previously, the national teams of Bangladesh and Turkmenistan (134th in the FIFA rankings) have not met each other.

In the final round, the national team of Turkmenistan will play on June 14 with the team of Bahrain, which, not without reason, is considered one of the favorites of the group. In the FIFA ranking, the football players of this country occupy the 89th place. Before that, the Bahrainis participated in the final of the Asian Cup six times (in 1988, 2004, 2007, 2011, 2015 and 2019). They achieved the highest result in this tournament in 2004, closing the quartet of the strongest. Since the summer of 2019, the well-known Portuguese specialist Eliu Sousa has been coaching the Bahrain national team, who intends to take the team of this country to the final stage of the Asian Cup this time.

The football players of Turkmenistan and Bahrain met four times at the level of the national teams. At the 12th Summer Asian Games 1994 in Hiroshima, the rivals played a draw - 2:2. In August 2005, the national team of Turkmenistan, in the absence of legionnaires from Russian, Kazakh and Uzbek clubs, lost away in a friendly match - 0:5.

After that, the teams played each other twice as part of the 2019 Asian Cup qualification. And both times then the Bahrainis celebrated the victory: 2:1 - away and 4:0 - at home. However, this did not prevent the national team of Turkmenistan from taking second place in the group and qualifying for the second time in its history in the final stage of the Asian Cup.

Recall that the winners of the six qualifying groups and the five best teams among the runners-up will advance to the final tournament of the 18th Asian Cup, which will be held from June 16 to July 16, 2023 in China.

Previously, 13 teams have already secured the right to participate in the final round of the 2023 Asian Cup. These are the teams of Syria, Australia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Japan, UAE, Republic of Korea, Oman, Iraq, Vietnam, China, Lebanon and Qatar.