By Andrew Warshaw at the Khalifa Stadium in Doha
January 7 – If a jaw-dropping opening ceremony and a dazzling firework display (pictured) high into the night sky are a barometer of a country’s ability to host a World Cup, then Qatar should have no worries about staging theirs in little under 12 years from now.
The tiny Middle East state rolled out the red carpet, literally and figuratively, for the start of the Asian Cup tonight in front of a near-capacity crowd at the state-of-the-art Khalifa Stadium.
The next three weeks represent the first test, since controversially winning the 2022 World Cup vote, of Qatar’s ability to stage a lengthy multi-national tournament.
No-one in their right mind would compare the regional Asian Cup with the magnitude of the World Cup.
This could not even really be described as a dress rehearsal.
But the thousands of fans – half decked out in traditional Arab dress, the other half casually-clad western ex-pats — gave us at least a taste of the kind of colour we might expect a decade or more down the road.
Qatar of course has bags of experience when it comes to putting on individual showpiece fixtures – they’ve been doing it for years now.
Only a few weeks ago, Brazil played Argentina in the same stadium, Lionel Messi and all.
There’s a strong argument to suggest that the Qatari crowd knew more about the household names on both sides that night than they did about their own country’s line-up this time round, let alone that of opponents Uzbekistan.
The football wasn’t exactly thrill-a-minute stuff but perhaps that was understandable, given that these two nations are distinct minnows – even on their own regional stage.
Prompted by a somewhat irritating public address announcer, the crowd dutifully cheered and blew their horns whenever Qatar went forward and were respectfully fair when the Uzbekistanis went close at the other end.
A tiny pocket of Uzbek fans huddled in one corner of the stadium were conspicuous by their blue, green and white national flags.
It was all somewhat twee and hardly raucous but the local staff bent over backwards to be accommodating even if some of them appeared to have had no training whatsoever.
Five stadiums are being used for the tournament, four of them a few miles apart in Doha city itself.
Twelve will be built in time for the World Cup, none of them subsequent white elephants according to Qatari officials.
The prospect of them all being bunched together in a country half the size of Wales is nevertheless a worry given the likelihood of several hundred thousand unfamiliar fans converging on this strictly Muslim territory of just 1.6 million.
That of course is some way off.
In the meantime 16 teams battle it out for the right to become Asian Cup winners.
Iraq are defending champions, Japan and South Korea, with their sprinkling of European-based players, among the favourites.
As for the maroon-clad Qataris, the opening script on home soil hardly went according to plan with an anticlimatic 2-0 defeat that led to a steady exit 10 minutes from time.
But there were compensations – it was easy to see why Sepp Blatter and others are already thinking about a winter World Cup.
This was as close as you could get to top-notch conditions – a light breeze, temperatures in their mid-20s and a pitch excellently prepared.
In other words, perfect for football.
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