Uzbekistan rise from heartbreak to reach the World Cup

Having enjoyed several near misses on the pitch and tragedy off it, the White Wolves have finally qualified for the FIFA World Cup.

Server Djeparov, Odil Ahmedov, Ignatiy Nesterov, Maxim Shatskikh and a host of other Uzbekistan icons all fell short. As too did one of the best players the nation has produced in the tigerish Timur Kapadze.

Among that pantheon of greats, Kapadze, as a coach, can now though say he did what the others couldn’t: reach a FIFA World Cup™. Ten years after he earned his 119th and final cap, the 43-year-old was on the sidelines as Uzbekistan finally flung the qualification monkey off their backs.

For a country that has witnessed several heartbreaking exits, chief among them being agonising defeats at the final stage of continental qualifiers for both Germany 2006 and Brazil 2014, finally their time has come.

Records will show that the moment came via a somewhat lifeless 0-0 draw in Abu Dhabi, some four-and-a-half thousand kilometres from home, but few, if any, will care about the manner in which history was made.

Not only are they the first Uzbek team to qualify, but they are the first from Central Asia, a vast expanse of land buffeted by Russia to the north, China PR to the east and a string of others to the south.

In a land where the sport was first played more than a century ago, tragedy has struck not just on the pitch but off it as well. A core group of one of the most talented generations the nation has produced was lost over the skies of modern-day Ukraine in 1979, when a plane carrying the mighty Pakhtakor side was involved in a mid-air collision.

From there the club and the league rebuilt. Vast resources have been poured into building state-of-the-art youth facilities across Uzbekistan, and at youth level they have shone. Twice over the past decade-and-a-half, they have reached the FIFA U-17 World Cup™ quarter-finals, while they made it to the last 16 at the previous FIFA U-20 World Cup™. The Olympic team, for their part, graced the Paris stage last year.

Alongside that collective growth has come a crop of fine young talent, led by the dynamic winger Abbosbek Fayzullaev and the commanding central defender Abdukodir Khusanov.

So dramatic has been Khusanov’s rise that he’s gone from the youth team at local power Bunyodkor to the heights of FIFA Club World Cup™-bound Manchester City in just three years; from barely having left his homeland to having Jack Grealish make a speech for him at his wedding last week in Manchester.

Just as this group was inspired by the fallen stars of generations past, the hope now is that their arrival on the global stage can keep that wheel spinning.