The top two teams from each of the nine groups of four in the second round will progress to the third stage.<\/p>\n
Australia, which is chasing a seventh World Cup appearance, leads Group I after routing Bangladesh.<\/p>\n
Jamie Maclaren scored a second-half hat trick, while Mitchell Duke netted two and Harry Souttar and Brandon Borrello added the others.<\/p>\n
\n
Palestine\u2019s Tamer Seyam in action with Lebanon\u2019s Ali Al Haj.
\n| Photo Credit:
\nREUTERS\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\nPalestine\u2019s Tamer Seyam in action with Lebanon\u2019s Ali Al Haj.
\n| Photo Credit:
\nREUTERS\n<\/p>\n
\u201cWe know that Palestine is going to be right up for it,\u201d Souttar said of Australia\u2019s next match in Kuwait. \u201cWe know that they\u2019re going to be playing for a lot more than just football.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut we\u2019re there to get a result and get a job done. We\u2019ll be professional and be going for the win.\u201d<\/p>\n
At Osaka, Ayase Ueda scored three goals in Japan\u2019s 5-0 victory over Myanmar. Daichi Kamada and Ritsu Doan also scored for Japan, which has appeared at the last seven World Cups.<\/p>\n
In other matches, China beat Thailand 2-1 as it seeks to return to the World Cup for the first time since making its debut at the tournament in 2002, Iran defeated Hong Kong 4-0, and Qatar routed Afghanistan 8-1 with Almoez Ali scoring four.<\/p>\n
Also, Saudi Arabia beat Pakistan 4-0, the United Arab Emirates defeated Nepal 4-0 and India beat Kuwait 1-0.<\/p>\n
\nComments\n<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\u00a0<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The continent\u2019s top teams joined the Asian qualifying competition in the second round on Thursday. South Korea and Japan also started with comfortable wins.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":8841,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8840","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-football-sport-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/baysidesports.com\/football\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8840","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/baysidesports.com\/football\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/baysidesports.com\/football\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baysidesports.com\/football\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8840"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/baysidesports.com\/football\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8840\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baysidesports.com\/football\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8841"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/baysidesports.com\/football\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8840"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baysidesports.com\/football\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8840"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baysidesports.com\/football\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8840"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}