The youth tournament might get shifted to a later date due to the Coronavirus pandemic....
The Asian Football Confederation (AFC) are set to postpone the AFC U16 Championship that is scheduled to be held in Bahrain from November 25, Goal understands.
Most of the AFC competitions, including the Champions League and AFC Cup, that were to be hosted in a centralised venue were slated to go ahead on schedule, but the governing body might be forced to make an exception for the U16 tournament.
AFC's 2022 World Cup qualifiers had already been postponed along with the draw for the AFC Cup knockout stages.
A couple of the participating nations has requested the apex body of football in Asia to shift the dates as they are not being able to adequately prepare for the tournament due to the worsening Coronavirus situations in their respective countries.
The tournament was first scheduled to be held from September 16 to October 3 but was postponed to November 25 due to the pandemic. AFC is currently deliberating on their request and might as well postpone the dates for the second time to 2021.
Had the World Cup qualifier gone ahead on schedule, the senior team was supposed to start their training abroad. The India U16 team would also have started training abroad if the tournament had gone ahead on schedule.
The 2020 AFC U16 Championship will feature 16 teams - 12 of them qualified after winning their qualification groups while four best runners-up were also handed a spot.
The format for the final tournament will feature four groups of four teams each. The winner and runner-up in each group will progress to the quarter-finals.
India qualified for the 2020 AFC U-16 Championship finals in September 2019 as the table-toppers from Group B. With two wins and a draw, India managed to pick up seven points from three matches to finish above Bahrain, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan in the qualifiers held in Uzbekistan.
Before going into the AFC U-16 qualifiers, the colts also enjoyed a 11-match winning streak. They built on their performance and finished with an unbeaten record in the qualifiers and boasted a goal difference of +10.
This was for the ninth time that India managed to qualify for the finals, having done it earlier in 1990, 1996, 2002, 2004, 2008, 2012, 2016, and 2018 editions of the competition.
The top four teams of the AFC U-16 Championship finals qualify for the U-17 World Cup as representatives of the AFC.