History
After the split of Soviet Union, they played their first match against Uzbekistan on 17 June 1992. It was not until 1994 that the Tajikistan National Football Federation was admitted to FIFA.
Tajikistan played its first official game on 11 April 1994 in Tashkent as part of a regional tournament. They lost that game against Kazakhstan 0:1. The first official competition the team entered was the Asian Nations Cup 1996 when it was seeded in the three-team Group 8 with Uzbekistan and Bahrain. Bahrain later withdrew leaving Tajikistan to play-off against their Middle Asian neighbors. Tajikistan won the first game 4:0, but were beaten in the away game 0:5 after extra time. They did not enter the World Cup qualifying competition until the France 1998 edition, recording four victories in their preliminary group stage including a 5–0 triumph over Turkmenistan, and losing only to China, which placed them second behind their eastern neighbors but out of the competition.
In a three-team qualifying section for Korea/Japan 2002, they had a record 16–0 win over Guam before losing 2–0 to Iran. After beating Bangladesh 4–0 on aggregate in the preliminary round of qualifiers for Germany 2006, they held AFC Asian Cup semi-finalists and eventual group winners Bahrain to a goalless draw on 31 March 2004.
The team won its first international tournament, the inaugural AFC Challenge Cup, in 2006, beating Sri Lanka 4–0 in Dhaka.
Read more about this topic: Tajikistan National Football Team
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“It is true that this man was nothing but an elemental force in motion, directed and rendered more effective by extreme cunning and by a relentless tactical clairvoyance .... Hitler was history in its purest form.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)
“This is the greatest week in the history of the world since the Creation, because as a result of what happened in this week, the world is bigger, infinitely.”
—Richard M. Nixon (1913–1995)
“Properly speaking, history is nothing but the crimes and misfortunes of the human race.”
—Pierre Bayle (1647–1706)