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Rion Ichihara scored the winning penalty as Japan defeated Iran 4-3 on penalties after their AFC U20 Asian Cup China 2025 quarter-final ended 1-1 at the Shenzhen Youth Football Training Base Centre Stadium on Sunday.<\/p>\n
Japan were struggling to cope and Iran took advantage of free space down the middle in the fifth minute, Reza Ghandipour pouncing on the rebound following Gholizadeh\u2019s attempt from inside a packed box to squeeze the ball into the bottom right corner.<\/p>\n
It came in the 30th minute when Kose Ogura had time and space to line up his shot from distance, with the ball taking a deflection off Amirmohammad Razzaghini to beat a fully stretched Arsha Shakouri.<\/p>\n
Japan started the first period of extra-time just as they had ended the second half as they peppered the Iran goalmouth with shots, with only some steely defending keeping them at bay.<\/p>\n
Iran continued to live dangerously as they conceded a free-kick at the start of the second period of extra-time but Shakouri pulled off another full length save to deny Ryunosuke Sato from just above the box, the-afc.com reported.<\/p>\n
With both sides unable to find the winner, the tie went to penalties and despite Shakouri\u2019s best efforts – scoring one and saving Japan\u2019s third in the shootout – Iran\u2019s Erfan Darvish Aali and Pourya Shahrabadi missed the opening two efforts with Ichihara netting the winning spot-kick as Japan advanced to the semi-finals.<\/p>\n
Japan will face Australia in the semi-finals with the win also confirming them a place in the FIFA U20 World Cup Chile 2025.<\/p>\n
MNA<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n
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Source link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Rion Ichihara scored the winning penalty as Japan defeated Iran 4-3 on penalties after their AFC U20 Asian Cup China 2025 quarter-final ended 1-1 at the Shenzhen Youth Football Training Base Centre Stadium on Sunday. Japan were struggling to cope and Iran took advantage of free space down the middle in the fifth minute, Reza …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":27719,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-27859","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hamsonews.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27859","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hamsonews.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hamsonews.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hamsonews.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hamsonews.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27859"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/hamsonews.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27859\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hamsonews.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/27719"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hamsonews.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27859"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hamsonews.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27859"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hamsonews.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27859"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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