On January 30, 2024, Beijing time, the long-awaited Asian football event, the Qatar Asian Cup, kicked off the fifth one-eighth final, with Uzbekistan facing Thailand. Although the Chinese men's football team has unfortunately lost in the group stage, because the Thai men's football team is in the same group as the Chinese team in the round of 36 of the world preliminary round of 36 and its strength cannot be underestimated, this event still attracts the attention of a large number of Chinese fans.
As Uzbekistan prepared for the tournament, their head coach made a unique approach – in addition to the usual training, they also stepped up their penalty practice in particular. Obviously, the aim of this strategy is to dominate the game with a solid defence, wait for the opponent to make a mistake, and drag the final game to a penalty shootout. For this reason, head coach Masata Ishii even chose to replace Mobachu and Supana with two defensive players in the game, so as to avoid their flaws in attack.
However, even in the absence of key attacking players Sergeyev, Uzbekistan still showed strong attacking ability, such as Masharipov, Kanrobkov and Urunov, who continued to pose a threat to the Thai team. The turnaround came in the 37th minute, when Turgunboyev cleverly connected to the stop, leaving the heavily defended Tira at a loss, and in the end, he calmly faced the attacking Bativa and changed the score to 1:0.
The latter, i.e., the Thai team had to accept defeat in order to achieve the goal of not conceding a goal. In the whole game, they only shot at the target three times, which was far less than one-tenth of the total number of shots taken by Uzbekistan, which shows the difference in quality.
After the substitutions, the game followed. Ishii replaced his players with a more attacking line-up, with Subachu and Supana joining in, a strategy that paid off. In the 58th minute of the game, the Thai team relied on excellent team cooperation to finally open up the situation for Subachol. He made up for the deficit with a brilliant shot from the pitch to make it 1-1.
In the final stages of the game, the leading Uzbekistan adopted a defensive formation pattern, leaving more opportunities for the Thai team to attack, however, they were unable to break down the Uzbek defence. The game came to an end when the referee blew the final whistle and Uzbekistan managed to win from behind to advance to the quarter-finals, where they will face a stronger team in the quarter-finals.