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Founded in 1933 and affiliated to FIFA in 1948, Afghanistan football has been overshadowed by its political turmoil. The national team played its first match in 1941 and was last seen on the international stage in 1984 during the qualifying competition for the Asian Cup. The Russian invasion and later the Taliban regime made it impossible to keep football going at domestic and international level. In fact, the side did not play a competitive international match from 1984 until 2002, when they competed at the Asian Games in Busan, Korea.
Having been away for 18 years, it was a difficult stage to make a comeback. The team lost all their matches by at least ten goals. However, the results were insignificant compared to the first step taken by the Afghanistan Football Federation (AFF) to rebuild the country through its football.
To aid them, FIFA has named the AFF as one of the beneficiaries of the GOAL project ?granting financial aid to build the AFF’s new headquarters as well as a training centre. Experts from Germany and England were also flown in to assist the locals with their administrative tasks and designing various development programmes.
Since the ‘re-birth’the national team has already registered first victory in almost 20 years in March of 2003 when they beat Kyrgyzstan 2-1 in an Asian Cup qualifying match. Sayeed Tahir Shah and Farid Azami were the scorers on that day. Their results in the 8-nation South Asian Football Federation (SAFF) Cup were also respectable ?losing to Sri Lanka and Pakistan 1-0 and India 4-0.
It looks like the Afghanis are on the right track and may soon relive their participation in the Olympics as did their antecedent in 1948.
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