BELJING; Peter Vellapan, general secretary of the Asian football confederation, has expressed. Disappointment with the standard of football witnessed at the Asian Games here and called for increased professionalism.
With these kind of teams in the Asiad we won’t be able to win the world cup in hundred years, Vellapan told newsmen during a press conference here.
He said all the teams, except for South Korea and Iran, have to improve at least by 500 times before talking about the world cup.
The biggest disappointment, he said, was the Chinese team which had let its supporters down for the second time, Last year they had failed to qualify for the world cup finals in Singapore and now here they had lost to Thailand in the quarter finals, he added.
The Asian football chief said the introduction of the professionalism seems to be the only alternative to improve the Asian soccer standard.
The AFC he said will try to influence and persuade the Asian countries and regions to introduce a professional football set up, employ professional coaches from the world soccer powers and play more games against the European and Latin ‘American countries.
Valappan, however, expressed satisfaction with the clean football played by the teams here as only 1.6 yellow cards per match were shown during the tournament and there were no red cards.
Meanwhile, the AFC executive committee has suspended Iraq from all the AFC competitions and activities for security reasons until the gulf crisis is settled, he said.
The AFC executive committee, which met here on Sept4, has authorized the AFC president, Datuk Hamza, to fill in the vice president post of the FIFA which fell vacant following the death of Sheikh Fahad of Kuwait during Iraq’s invasion of that country.
The AFC had also given full recognition to the Kuwait football association in exile and has allowed it to participate in all the AFC and FIFA activities.
Article extracted from this publication >> October 19, 1990
