The Olympic Green’s victory in the Asian Cup this week was nothing short of the culmination of the great successes Saudi football has had this season and began with the entry of the junior team into the West Asia final, then the march continued with the sixth qualification for the 2022 World Cup in Qatar. which was the biggest evidence that Al-Akhdar reached the first world championship. then Italy.
He described the qualifying trip to America as brutal, on top of the final qualifiers being played in a very difficult geopolitical atmosphere due to the first Gulf War and the fall of Saudi Arabia into the Iraq and Iran group. Asia twice, Singapore 84, Doha 88 and reaching to the final against Japan to start from Doha a World Cup trip to America 94, France 98, Korea and Japan 2002, then Germany 2006, punctuated by winning the Asian Cup in the UAE 96 and then missing out on the World Cup in South Africa 2010, Brazil 2014 and return to Russia 2018, and during this trip there were continuous attempts to make Saudi professionalism, which started in 92, a real professional standing on its feet after the clubs faced great difficulties as a result of political conditions in the Gulf region which affected the activities of Al-Akhdar and its international presence. It ended only with the intervention of the government in 2017, paying off the debts of the clubs and allocating huge budgets that allowed the wheel of professionalism to turn in full force, which helped the clubs to pay attention to the forgotten rule again. For a while, to make this a priority for building the future, the fruits quickly came through the Sunni teams, with Al-Akhdar U23 having their best continental record this week under young national coach Saad Al-Shehri.
However, it is important here that Al-Akhdar’s qualification for the World Cup in Doha is not the ultimate goal of a team that has participated in the World Cup 5 times and started its journey about twenty years ago with impressive results in “qualifying for the World Cup”. The second stage of the World Cup “and that the task of Herve Renard and his team is to raise the ceiling of ambition to a level that exceeds qualifications.
