FOOTBALL – BAHRAIN’S under-23 Olympic football team leave for Iraq today to conduct a week-long overseas training camp.
The gathering is being held as part of their preparations for the AFC U23 Asian Cup 2026 Qualifiers, which are scheduled to be held in September.
During their camp, the Bahrainis will be playing two friendly games against their Iraqi counterparts. The first will be on Saturday and the other on Tuesday next week.
They are then scheduled to return to the kingdom on Wednesday.
Olympic team head coach Ali Abdulmajeed has selected a squad of 24 players to travel to Iraq. They include goalkeepers Ashraf Mubarak, Mohammed Khalifa, and Abdulla Freah, along with Issa Abdulla, Ahmed Dhiya, Abdulla Al Qassab, Mohammed Al Shihani, Salman Younes, Bader Al Asam, Abdulla Al Obaidli, Sayed Ahmed Al Wadaie, Mahmood Al Bannai, Abdulrahman Aboud, Rashed Mujiran, Abdulrahman Al Khayyat, Salem Al Dosari, Ali Sahwan, Saad Al Attar, Saud Mohsen, Ali Tarada, Hassan Samir, Abdulla Al Subaie, Mubarak Mohammed, and Khaled Khalaf.
The Iraq camp is the second overseas trip for the kingdom’s under-23 side this summer. They had just competed in a four-nation tournament in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, earlier this month. There, they played their counterparts from Oman, Syria, and Kyrgyzstan.
In the AFC U23 Asian Cup 2026 Qualifiers, Bahrain are one of 44 Olympic teams entered. They will be playing in 11 groups, each to be held in a centralised location.
At the end of a single round-robin, each group winner and the four best best-ranked runners-up will book their tickets to next year’s competition proper and join hosts Saudi Arabia, who are staging the event for the first time.
Bahrain are in Group H alongside Qatar, India, and Brunei Darussalam. Their games will be played in Doha.
Group A features hosts Jordan, Turkmenistan, Chinese Taipei, and Bhutan; Group B is composed of hosts Myanmar, Japan, Kuwait, and Afghanistan; Group C consists of hosts Vietnam, Yemen, Singapore, and Bangladesh; Group D comprises hosts China, Australia, Timor-Leste, and Northern Mariana Islands; Group E features hosts Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Palestine, and Sri Lanka; Group F consists of hosts Thailand, Malaysia, Lebanon, and Mongolia; Group G is composed of hosts Cambodia, Iraq, Oman, and Pakistan; Group I comprises hosts UAE, Iran, Hong Kong, and Guam; Group J features hosts Indonesia, South Korea, Laos, and Macau; and Group K is composed of hosts Tajikistan, Syria, the Philippines, and Nepal.
Next year’s AFC U23 Asian Cup will be its seventh edition. Bahrain have qualified for the tournament just once in the past – in the 2020 event held in Bangkok, Thailand, where they finished last in Group A during the opening stage.
patrick@gdnmedia.bh
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