The gap between the Round of 12 is incredibly long, which also gives the teams a lot of room to adjust. In addition to the change of coach of the national football team, the two top two Saudi Arabia and Oman in the same group chose to participate in the Arab Cup, as the biggest event in Asia and Africa, this time 16 teams, there are 5 Asian Cup champion teams and 4 African Cup champion teams, the competition is no less fierce than the World Preliminary Round.
As the best performing team in Asia, Saudi Arabia's performance has attracted a lot of attention. However, in the Arab Cup, the Saudi team lost 0-1 to Jordan in the first match and was tragically blacked out. The defeat also brought to an end to the Saudi team's 2021 unbeaten semblance, with just one shot in the game that humiliated the biggest winner of the round of 12 by third-rate jordan. In the second round, Saudi Arabia's overall state has picked up, but in the face of the tenacious Palestinians, Saudi Arabia has taken the lead in losing the ball in a good situation of 59% possession. With 81 minutes of goal, Saudi Arabia struggled to score their first points 1-1.
In the third round, Saudi Arabia encountered the African champion Morocco, although Benatia, Ashraf, Ziyeh and other well-known stars have not returned to their home countries for league reasons, Morocco's overall strength has declined significantly. But even so, Saudi Arabia in the game is also full of embarrassment, the whole game Morocco got 60% of the possession, creating 16 shots on goal, while Saudi Arabia only had 2 shots, and finally Saudi Arabia lost 0-1, the group stage bottom out. No one expected that Saudi Arabia, which had previously killed four parties in the round of 12, would show such a big contrast in the Arab Cup, which could not help but wonder whether they would have a big slide in the subsequent round of 12 and be overtaken by opponents such as Japan and Australia.
The other team, Oman, played slightly better than Saudi Arabia, but the overall performance was also unsatisfactory. The team was forced to draw 1-1 by Iraq in the first round, and in the second round, the team suffered a 1-2 defeat against the new Asian Cup champions Qatar. In the third round against the less powerful Bahrain, Oman finally won and finally broke through from the group with 4 points. But in the knockout round against the first opponent Tunisia, Oman also suffered a dimensional reduction blow. Tunisia fired 16 kicks in the game, including 5 shots on target and 11 corners, oman almost did not even have the strength to fight, and finally was eliminated 1-2 without suspense.
From the performance of Saudi Arabia and Oman, it can be seen that no matter how good the performance of the top 12 matches, their overall stability is still inferior to those traditional strong teams in Asia and Africa, Saudi Arabia and Oman are teams that have slowly completed their transformation in the past decade or so, and it is not too much to call them rising stars. And their Waterloo-like performance also made their probability of qualifying plummet, and at the same time let the national football team see the hope of counterattack. As we all know, the performance of the national football team in the Li Tie era can only be described as bad, and only 5 points are scored in the current 6 rounds of competition, and only Vietnam's performance is worse than that of the national football team.
However, after Li Tie left the class, the national football team showed a thriving situation. The new Li Xiaopeng makes fans full of expectations for the follow-up Chinese team, and now the national football team has not lost the hope of qualifying, and the Saudi team and Oman team have not locked the place in advance. Therefore, every team has the opportunity to turn over, especially saudi arabia's ups and downs, it is really difficult to understand their true strength, the national football team does not have to be arrogant, just need to do their own, the rest of the time to prove.