Highlights of the second round of the Gulf 24

The second round of the two groups of Gulf 24 alone ended with only the Iraqi team qualifying for the Golden Square, while the Yemeni was the first to leave, and the struggle remains between six teams for the remaining three cards.

In this report, we observe the most significant phenomena of the second round of the tournament.

The first Qatari hat-trick

The Qatari team waited 49 years to score a hat-trick in one match in the tournament, supporting most of the previous Gulf tournaments and played 110 games from Gulf 1 in Bahrain to the date of the second game in Gulf 24.

Abdul Karim Hassan managed to score a hat-trick against the Yemeni team through a free kick and another kick as well as a fair penalty through which he became equal to Ali Mabkhout in the tournament by three goals.

Qatar presented prominent strikers in the Gulf tournaments, most notably Mubarak Mustafa, Mahmoud Sophie, Mansour Muftah, Ibrahim Khalfan and Mohammed Salem Al-Enezi. However, the first hat-trick in the history of the tournament came from a player who plays in the position of defender (left back).

Muscat experience repeated on the Yemeni

The Yemeni team suffered a loss in this round to the Qatari hosts, a loss that took them out of the tournament and left them to enter the third round outside the competition.

However, this loss is not the most severe in the history of Yemen in the Gulf championships. They also suffered the same result to Saudi Arabia on January 8, 2009 in Gulf 19 in the game held at the police stadium in the capital Muscat.

Malik Moaz scored for Saudi Arabia on two occasions and a goal for Yasser Al-Qahtani, Malik Moaz, Abdullah Shuhail, Ahmed Atif and Ahmed Musa. The Yemeni federation then decided to sack the Egyptian Mohsen Saleh and assign the task to the current coach Sami Al-Na’ash.

Gulf 24 is equivalent to Gulf 17

Gulf 17 in Qatar in 2004 has still the most scores since the introduction of the new system with 59 goals. Gulf 21 in Bahrain comes in second place with a difference of 23 goals, which reflects the open offensive play that was 17.

However, Gulf 24 managed to equalize the number of the Gulf 17, where 13 goals were scored in the second round in both tournaments, an indication of the high rate in the remaining stage of the competition, with seven games of this tournament.

In total, 23 goals were scored after two rounds in the 24th Gulf, while 26 were scored after two rounds from the 17th Gulf.

In Gulf 19, 11 goals were scored, and in Gulf 18 shots netted 10 times. In the Gulf 21 and 22, shots netted nine times and in the Gulf 20 in Yemen 8 goals only were scored and 5 goals in the last tournament.

‘VAR’ technology first appears

VAR video was not used in the first round of the 24th Gulf Championship. However, the second round formed the first appearance of this modern technology in the Gulf tournaments through Belgian referee Alexandre Boucaut, who resorted to it in the second half of the match between Iraq and UAE and awarded a penalty for Iraq wasted by Ali Adnan.

Kuwaiti referee Ali Mahmoud Shaaban re-used it twice in the Qatar-Yemen match and confirmed in one of them the validity of his decision.

Qatari referee Khamis Al-Marri also resorted to technology and awarded Oman a penalty in the second round of the match.

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