The two teams drew in their previous meeting in the group stage
It is like a circle that ends where it begins. The 25th Gulf Championship, hosted by Iraq, kicked off with a game between the host country and one of the most prominent teams in the tournament, the Omani national team.
After 4 matches played by both teams, they returned to meet again in the final match.
The opening match between Iraq and Oman ended in a draw, the only match that the two teams failed to win, while they beat Saudi Arabia and Yemen, the other two teams, in Group A.
However, Iraq topped the group with seven points, with a goal difference from the Omani team, which collected the same points.
After the end of the group stage, Iraq met its Qatari counterpart in the semi-finals, and beat it with two goals to one.
While the Omani team crossed the Bahraini team, the holder of the last championship title, with a clean goal, to write the history of the championship, a rare scenario, in which the final match is between the two sides of the opening match.
The two teams’ meetings in the past witnessed fierce competition, but the scale tilted strongly towards the Iraqi team, which has a long history in the tournament.
The two teams met in the tournament 11 times, including the group stage meeting in the current tournament. Iraq won 4 of them and drew in 5 others, while the Omani team won the remaining two matches.
But on the scoring level, and here the fierce competition between the two teams clearly stands out. Iraq scored 19 goals in the Omani net, while Oman scored 12 goals.
The first meeting between the two teams was in the fourth edition of the tournament hosted by Qatar in 1976, and ended with Iraq’s victory over Oman with four clean goals.
The biggest result was Iraq’s victory over Oman by seven clean, in the fifth edition of the tournament hosted by Iraq in 1979.
And when the Romanian international referee, Stephan Kovacs, blows his whistle announcing the end of the final match in Basra, it will become clear who is the winning team.
The Iraqi national team won the championship title 3 times in the past, in 1979, 1984 and 1988, while the Omani national team waited a long time to achieve its first title in 2009, then added the second title to its tally in 2018.
As for the numbers achieved by the two teams during the current tournament, they say that Iraq scored 9 goals, with a scoring rate that exceeds two goals per match, as the most scoring team, while it conceded only once, at a rate of a quarter of a goal in each match, which is the strongest defense in the tournament as well. ,
For its part, Oman scored only 4 goals, at a rate of one goal per match, while it conceded two goals, at a rate of half a goal per match.
As for the top scorer of the tournament, he is the Iraqi Ayman Hussein, with 3 goals.
