KARACHI: So close, yet so far. The Pakistan team was within one game of making it to the inaugural AFC U-14 Championships but their 3-0 loss to Iran in their final Group ‘D’ match on Monday sent them second and out of the running from a place in the finals set to be held next year in Uzbekistan.

Pakistan went into the game level on nine points with Iran at the top of their qualification group. They needed a victory at the Samen Al Aemeh Stadium in the Iranian city of Mashhad.

But the hosts, in the end, proved the stronger team as they topped the group with a maximum 12 points, three ahead of Pakistan and six ahead of India.

Iran join fellow group winners Iraq (Group ‘A’), Saudi Arabia (Group ‘B’), Tajikistan (Group ‘C’), South Korea (Group ‘G’) and North Korea (Group ‘H’) as the teams who have reached the finals. Groups ‘E’ and ‘F’ will be played in May.

For Pakistan, meanwhile, the tournament showed that they can mix it with the big boys at junior levels.

For years, many coaches in the country believe that at the lower-age level, Pakistan are good enough to come out on top.

“There is no difference between the U-14 teams of Iran, Korea or Pakistan,” former Pakistan coach Tariq Lutfi told Dawn last month, referring to the teams which lie more than 100 places above the Greenshirts in the FIFA rankings.

“The only problem is that after those age levels, there is no set-up in place in Pakistan to improve their skills and make them professional footballers,” Lutfi added.

If Pakistan football needs to prosper, then the performance of the u-14 team needs to act as a springboard.

On the recent performance, the future seems bright. The Pakistan team hampered Turkmenistan (6-0) and Kyrgyzstan (8-0) before beating arch-rivals India, a team which is looking at their current crop of youngsters to make it to the 2026 World Cup, 2-0 on Sunday.

“We’ve only recently started to work on the grass-roots levels in India,”  All-India Football Federation’s technical director Robert Baan told CNN last week. “With continued development, the country might be ready to participate in the 2022 World Cup … or more realistically, 2026 or 2030.”

India already has academies in place to nurture its young talent. They have football schools run by foreign clubs like Manchester United and the AIFF has already opened three academies in various parts of India.

Lutfi believes the Pakistan Football Federation (PFF) does exactly the same.

According to him, to help Pakistan’s U-14 talent groom into professional footballers, the country needs academies in four of country’s footballing hot-beds.

“We need to open academies in Karachi, Chaman [in Balochistan], Faisalabad [in Punjab] and Peshawar,” he reckons. “Most of the country’s football talent comes from these places.

“Once the PFF academies open in these places, the talent we have at junior levels can be made stronger, fitter and better and when they reach the national team, they’re at par with players in the rest of Asia.”

The PFF is aiming to do exactly that.

“We’re aiming to improve the football structure in the country so this talent doesn’t go waste,” PFF secretary Col Ahmed Yar Khan Lodhi told Dawn on Monday.

“Under the [FIFA] Goal Project, we’re looking at setting up academies in five different cities namely Karachi, Sukkur, Jacobabad, Quetta and Lahore.”

With the PFF having also signed a deal with Beaconhouse School System (BSS) recently for a ‘School Development Programme’, Pakistan can be optimistic that players like Majeed Khan, the star for the U-14 team with six goals in Iran, will not go into anonymity in a decade’s time.