The Indian football team is set to play international friendlies against higher-ranked Saudi Arabia and China in the run-up to next year’s AFC Asian Cup, according to a top official of the All India Football Federation .<\/p>\n
The 2019 Asian Cup will be held from January 5 to February 1 across eight centres in four United Arab Emirates cities.<\/p>\n
“We are in talks with them and it’s almost 90 percent. We are trying to arrange one home and one away game around October-November,” Das said.<\/p>\n
Saudi Arabia, who are participating in the ongoing FIFA World Cup in Russia, are currently ranked 67, while China are placed 75th.<\/p>\n
The top 24 teams from all over Asia are drawn into six groups of four teams each.<\/p>\n
The top AIFF official said they are looking to arrange matches for the national team keeping in line with FIFA’s changed ranking system.<\/p>\n
India, ranked 14, in the Asian region, are high on confidence following their title triumph in the Intercontinental Cup recently.<\/p>\n
Inspirational captain Sunil Chhetri scored a brace to lead the home side to a 2-0 win over Kenya in the summit clash at the Mumbai Football Arena on June 10.<\/p>\n
Teams in a group will play each other once and the top two from each group will qualify for the Round of 16 along with the best four third-placed teams.<\/p>\n
The continental championship will be held across eight stadia in four cities in the UAE Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Sharjah and Al Ain.<\/p>\n
This is India’s fourth qualification in the Asian Cup. India had finished runners-up to Israel in 1964. In the 1984 edition, India crashed out at the group stage with one draw and three losses.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Indian football team is set to play international friendlies against higher-ranked Saudi Arabia and China in the run-up to next year’s AFC Asian Cup, according to a top official of the All India Football Federation . The 2019 Asian Cup will be held from January 5 to February 1 across eight centres in four […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":34643,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[122],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-34642","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34642","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34642"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34642\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":34644,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34642\/revisions\/34644"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/34643"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34642"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34642"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34642"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}