Kazakhstan's Surprising Victory in Euro-2008 Qualifier
Kazakhstan's Maksim Zhalmagambetov (R) jumps
for the ball next to Serbia's Nikola Zigic
For the first time since joining the UEFA (Union of European
Football Associations) in 2002, Kazakhstan claims competitive victory:
its team defeated the Serbian with 2:1 in Group A. It was also the first
time the Kazakhstan team scored at home in a European qualifier. It is
a surprising victory, as Serbian team was team A's favourite, and previously
Kazakhstan has only won once when it played against Armenia in 2004, out
of 25 friendly and competitive international games against UEFA member
associations. It used to show better results in AFC (Asian Football Confederation),
when it was defeating Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, thus the transfer was
criticised.
Rakhat Aliyev, the President of Kazakhstan Football Federation, was the
one who transferred the Kazakhstan team from AFC to UEFA. After a long
series of dissapointments, the team finally shows the results, thus the
transfer to a stronger league is paying off. Kazakhstan Today published
a quick interview with Rakhat Aliyev, who is indeed very happy about Kazakhstan's
victory:
I always was against skeptics and whiners who declared that we would never
win world level teams. I knew and believed that this day will come and
we will win. The work of thousand and thousand of people could not get
away with that. We have won strong and experienced Serbian team who is
a leader in our group and played in the final round of Germany championship.
This game will go down in history of Kazakh football.
Run of bad luck has finished. We started to win and are not going to stop:
we already have 5 points.
Great thanks to our players for their selfless play for our country, many
thanks to our coach, and also to all fans who all the time believed that
we do not speak at random.
For Serbia, the defeat came as a shock: 'There is no excuse for this embarrassing
defeat but I've told the players to keep their heads up and focus on the
upcoming match with Portugal', said Javier Clemente, Serbia's Spanish
coach.
,
26/03/2007.
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