While all competitive sport is guided by a single overarching plot — who will be the winner? — sometimes what makes sport so memorable is what happens elsewhere; the array of characters and storylines, emotions and drama, that occur away from or alongside the main action.
Kerr currently sits on 49 international goals, just one away from the current all-time record-hold held by Tim Cahill, who scored his 50th goal for Australia in October 2017 before retiring. The current world number 19 has won more than twice as many continental titles as the next best-performing countries .
It has partly been an issue of succession. Once boasting the FIFA World Player of the Century in Sun Wen and cracking into the top five in the world rankings in the early 2000s, China did not appear to have a long-term strategy in place for when its golden generation of the 1990s retired.Having fallen down the global pecking order over the past 10 years, China now has a plan to make the nation a footballing superpower.
Iran will make their Women's Asian Cup debut after defeating Bangladesh and Jordan in last year's qualifiers. "I expect that, with proper planning, our women's national teams will be organised in other age groups and a five-year plan for the growth and development of women's football will be implemented.
In fact, this edition of the Asian Cup will be more important than ever for some of these emerging teams, given the tournament doubles as a qualifying path to next year's Women's World Cup – and a gateway to all the extra funding and visibility that comes with it. In other words, five Asian nations will now qualify for the 2023 tournament, while two more teams will advance to an intercontinental play-off, which means we could see at least two Asian debutants at next year's tournament.
So while the Asian Cup might not mean much to the bigger nations that regularly reach its pointy end , it matters a great deal – and perhaps even more — for the national teams still trying to grow in their shadow.Given Japan won the past two editions of the Asian Cup, you would assume it will come into the 2022 tournament as the overwhelming favourite.
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