The teams of India and the Kyrgyz Republic became rivals of the national team of Turkmenistan following the results of the draw for the women’s qualifying football tournament for the Olympic Games to be held in Paris in 2024 at the headquarters of the Asian Football Confederation in Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia).
26 teams divided into 7 groups will compete in the first round of qualification.
Turkmenistan and its rivals formed group “G”.
Compositions of the rest:
Group “A”: Uzbekistan, Jordan, East Timor, Bhutan.
Group “B”: Myanmar, Iran, Bangladesh, Maldives.
Group “C”: Vietnam, Nepal, Palestine, Afghanistan.
Group “D”: Thailand, Mongolia, Singapore, Sri Lanka.
Group “E”: Philippines, Hong Kong, Tajikistan, Pakistan.
Group “F”: Taiwan, Indonesia, Lebanon.
The matches of the first qualifying round in Asia will be held in a centralized format in one round from April 3 to April 11, 2023. The venues of the games in all groups will be determined later.
Only the winners of seven groups will advance to the second qualifying round, where they will be joined by the five highest-ranked teams in Asia – the DPRK, Japan, Australia, China and the Republic of Korea.
The four best teams of the second qualifying round (the three group winners and the best team among the runners-up) will meet in the third qualifying stage. In the final round, the teams will form two pairs, where they will play two matches – at home and away. The winners of the pairs will get the right to play at the women’s football tournament of the 2024 Olympics in Paris.
The 54-year-old head coach of the national and youth (U-20) national teams Kamil Mingazov will prepare Turkmen football players for the Olympic qualifying tournament. Under him, the national team of Turkmenistan has made some progress – it played in the first ever championship of the Central Asian Football Association (CAFA) in Dushanbe, taking points from the teams of Tajikistan (1:1) and Kyrgyzstan (0:0). Thanks to these results, the women’s national team of Turkmenistan in August 2022 for the first time got into the rating of the International Federation of Football Associations (FIFA), finishing 2022 in 137th place among 187 teams.
“The future rivals are well known to us. At the preparatory training camp in 2019, in Turkey, we have already met with the Indian team, which looks like the favorite in our group. Indian football players are fast, they made a good impression. We also played with the Kyrgyz national team last year at the CAFA Championship in Tajikistan. We will play and we are not going to concede to anyone,” Kamil Mingazov, the head coach of the Turkmenistan women’s national football team, commented on the results of the draw to the “The Golden Age” correspondent.
