Neftchi no more

The Neftchi line-up against PPCFC in last season's AFC President's Cup final stage

The Kyrgyzstan football championship is five games into its 2012 campaign and Dordoi Bishkek, who scored a late penalty success over Phnom Penh Crown at the Olympic Stadium recently, are in second spot. They will be joining Crown in the six-team final of the AFC President's Cup in September at a location still to be decided by AFC. However, one name missing from the Kyrgyz championship this season is that of Neftchi Kochkor-Ata, who Crown fans will remember also inflicted a 1-nil defeat of Crown in the qualifying competition last season. Though Crown did get their revenge, beating Neftchi 2-1 in the final stages of the AFC President's Cup in Taiwan. That was effectively Neftchi's swansong after the club suffered a funding shortfall from its main sponsor Kyrgyzneftgaz - the Department of State's oil and gas company - and collapsed on the eve of the new season. Neftchi won the league title in 2010 ending a six-year stranglehold of the country's top football league by Dordoi, though lost out again last term, finishing runners-up to their main rivals. Now their sixty year history has come to an inglorious end and it remains to be seen whether football in the Kochkor-Ata area of the country will regain a representative next season. Football fans noticed a team by the same name, FC Neftchi playing in the AFC Cup this year and wondered aloud if Neftchi had been promoted. They hadn't. The Neftchi team competing in the higher-graded competition are from Uzbekistan.

End of the road

After their abject failure at the AFC President's Cup and a disastrous league campaign, Myanmar's Yadanarbon have sacked their French manager, Yoan Girard and replaced him with Brazilian Jose Alves Borges. That is despite Girard guiding the club to a President's Cup victory in 2010, two Myanmar league championships and a Myanmar Cup success in the three years he was at the helm. You are only as good as your last game is the age-old football adage, and in Girard's case, his previous record counted for nothing as his services were dispensed with. Girard coached in France and Morocco as well as with Muangthong in Thailand, before linking up with Yadanarbon. The club have returned to Muangthong for their next coach, with Borges acting as the Thai club's technical director this year after previous coaching success with junior Thai teams and Tobacco Monopoly, who won the Thai title in 2004, and TTM Phichit in the Thai Premier. To spice up their pre-season Yadanarbon have announced that they will undertake a European tour and meet Division 2 clubs in Spain, Italy, Germany and Belgium in June next year. In this season's AFC President's Cup they lost 4-0 to Phnom Penh Crown and then 8-2 to Neftchi, which was simply too much for the club's owners to take. The club eventually finished in 9th spot in the 12-team league championship, which was won by Yangon United. The other team that Phnom Penh Crown faced, and beat, in the group stage of the AFC President's Cup, Neftchi from Kyrgyzstan, finished runners-up in their league title race, with Dordoi-Dynamo reclaiming the trophy they'd won six times in a row before Neftchi's 2010 success.