Malaysia U-23 coach Ong Kim Swee has been optimistic about the chance of his side at next year’s AFC U-23 Championship\u00a0in China.<\/p>\n
Malaysia\u00a0have been drawn in Group C with three Middle East sides \u2013 Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Jordan.<\/p>\n
\u201cIraq are the favourite because they are always good at the youth level. But the gap in age group tournaments is not big although we are from South-East Asia,\u201d said Kim Swee after the draw in Changzhou yesterday, as quoted <\/a>by The Star.<\/a><\/p>\n \u201cYou can see from the group that we have three Middle East teams and they have been playing against each other most of the time in their region.<\/p>\n \u201cThe draw also gives us a slight advantage because we will have to prepare against teams who play a similar type of football.\u201d<\/p>\n It has been the first time Malaysia competing in the final round of U-23 Asia Championship after finishing top of their group ahead of Thailand, Indonesia and Mongolia in the qualifying round in July.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Malaysia U-23 coach Ong Kim Swee has been optimistic about the chance of his side at next year’s AFC U-23 Championship\u00a0in China. Malaysia\u00a0have been drawn in Group C with three Middle East sides \u2013 Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Jordan. \u201cIraq are the favourite because they are always good at the youth level. But the gap in age group tournaments is not big although we are from South-East Asia,\u201d said Kim Swee after the draw in Changzhou yesterday, as quoted by The Star. \u201cYou can see from the group that we have three Middle East teams and they have been playing against each other most of the time in their region. … Continue reading “Malaysia coach Ong Kim Swee looks for a bright side at AFC U-23 Championship”<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":90,"featured_media":5129,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[857],"tags":[520,64,215],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/football-tribe.com\/asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8204"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/football-tribe.com\/asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/football-tribe.com\/asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/football-tribe.com\/asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/90"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/football-tribe.com\/asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8204"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/football-tribe.com\/asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8204\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/football-tribe.com\/asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5129"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/football-tribe.com\/asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8204"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/football-tribe.com\/asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8204"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/football-tribe.com\/asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8204"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}