The league conference is supposed to welcome the clubs of the small European countries, but a club in Central Asia has managed to qualify for the Champions League! The Kairat Almaty, champion of Kazakhstan, released Celtic in dams of the C1! After a zero result in Scotland (0-0), the Kairat held out in front of its audience and ended up winning the penalty shootout (0-0, Tab: 2-4).
Kasper Schmeichel and his teammates were unable to make the difference for 120 minutes. The opposing goalkeeper, Temirlan Anarbekov, number 2 in his team, held it before being the evening hero during the penalty shootout. The Japanese Daizen Maeda did not transform the last attempt of Celtic …
The Kairat Almaty started its crazy epic in the first round of qualifying, by beating the Olimpija Ljubljana (1-3 to the cumulative), the Finnish of Kups (2-3 in the cumulative) and the Slovan Bratislava, also in penalties (1-1 in the cumulative, Tab: 4-3).
The most distant club in the history of the LDC
Former Republic of the USSR, Kazakhstan was enrolled in FIFA in 1992 and then asked for its integration into UEFA in 2000, which was validated two years later. A small part in the west of the country, a desert, is considered to be part of Europe. Kazakh football has therefore developed with the allocations of UEFA and Astana was the first club to rise in LDC in 2015.
The Kairat Almaty will obviously appear in the fourth hat of the draw on Thursday (6 p.m.) and four participants will inherit an extremely distant trip to Central Asia, about ten hours of plane. Kairat becomes the most eastern club in the history of the Champions League. The largest city in Kazakhstan, Almaty is located in the east of the country, near China. Almaty is closer to Tokyo than Madrid…
