Matildas to do it tough to qualify for Beijing

Australia’s women’s national team (the Qantas Matildas) will have to qualify for the 2008 Beijing Olympics the hard way, even if they are crowned AFC Women’s Asian Cup Champions this afternoon.

Australia-s women-s national team (the Qantas Matildas) will have to qualify for the 2008 Beijing Olympics the hard way, even if they are crowned AFC Women-s Asian Cup Champions this afternoon.

The AFC Women-s Committee decided that 14 teams would contest the qualifiers for the two spots available to Asian teams. China, as host, qualifies automatically.

Australia will be unseeded, ranked behind Japan, South Korea, Thailand and Myanmar, who all lost to the Matildas in the AFC Women-s Asian Cup.

The seedings have been based on the performance of the teams in the last Olympic qualifiers (for Athens). Japan are the top seeds followed by DPR Korea and both teams have been given a first round bye, qualifying automatically for the second round.

Korea Republic is seeded 3, followed by Chinese Taipei (4), Thailand (5), Vietnam (6), Hong Kong (7) and Myanmar (8), Singapore (9) and five other unseeded teams that includes Australia, India, Maldives, Jordan and Uzbekistan.

The remaining 12 teams will be split into three groups of four teams each and will play one round-robin, centralized league. The top two teams (six in total) from each group will go to the next round, along with Japan and DPR Korea.

The second round will see the eight teams split into two groups and play home and away in a league format. The top team from each group will represent Asia in the Beijing Olympics in 2008, other than hosts China.