AFF Championship

The AFF Championship (ASEAN Football Championship), is a biennial international association football competition organised by the ASEAN Football Federation (AFF), contested by the national teams of Southeast Asia. It was founded as the Tiger Cup after Singapore-based Asia Pacific Breweries, makers of Tiger Beer, sponsored the competition from its inauguration in 1996 until the 2004 edition. After Asia Pacific Breweries withdrew as title sponsors, the competition was known as the AFF Championship for the 2007 edition. From 2008, Japanese auto-company Suzuki bought the naming rights for the competition, and the competition has therefore been named the AFF Suzuki Cup for sponsorship reasons. The official football since 2014 of the cup has been Mitre - and in 2016 the Delta Hyperseam will be the ball of choice.

Results

Summaries

From 2004, the knockout stage is played over two legs on a home-and-away format without the away goals rule. However, the away goals rule was put into effect from the 2010 edition.

2004 AFF Championship

The 2004 AFF Championship, officially known as the 2004 Tiger Cup, was jointly hosted by Vietnam and Malaysia from 7 December to 16 January 2005 and participated by the national football teams of Southeast Asia.

The championship started off with group matches, where the top two teams from each group advanced to the semi-finals and the final, which was played in a home and away format.

Summary

In the group matches, Indonesia, coached by former Thailand coach Peter Withe, emerged as the Group A winners with ten points, 17 goals scored and none conceded. They were the hot favourites to win the 2004 AFF Championship after bundling out the hosts Vietnam with an unexpected 3-0 victory. Less than a day after the match had ended, the Vietnam Football Federation requested the resignation from its national coach Edson Tavares, despite his requests to stay on until the last match. Singapore, led by Raddy Avramovic pipped out the hosts by just a single point and remained to be the only team in the championship to not lose a single match.

Tiger

The tiger (Panthera tigris) is the largest cat species, reaching a total body length of up to 3.38 m (11.1 ft) over curves and exceptionally weighing up to 388.7 kg (857 lb) in the wild. Its most recognisable feature is a pattern of dark vertical stripes on reddish-orange fur with a lighter underside. The species is classified in the genus Panthera with the lion, leopard, jaguar and snow leopard. Tigers are apex predators, primarily preying on ungulates such as deer and bovids. They are territorial and generally solitary but social animals, often requiring large contiguous areas of habitat that support their prey requirements. This, coupled with the fact that they are indigenous to some of the more densely populated places on Earth, has caused significant conflicts with humans.

Tigers once ranged widely across Asia, from Turkey in the west to the eastern coast of Russia. Over the past 100 years, they have lost 93% of their historic range, and have been extirpated from southwest and central Asia, from the islands of Java and Bali, and from large areas of Southeast and Eastern Asia. Today, they range from the Siberian taiga to open grasslands and tropical mangrove swamps. The remaining six tiger subspecies have been classified as endangered by IUCN. The global population in the wild is estimated to number between 3,062 and 3,948 individuals, down from around 100,000 at the start of the 20th century, with most remaining populations occurring in small pockets isolated from each other, of which about 2,000 exist on the Indian subcontinent. Major reasons for population decline include habitat destruction, habitat fragmentation and poaching. The extent of area occupied by tigers is estimated at less than 1,184,911 km² (457,497 sq mi), a 41% decline from the area estimated in the mid-1990s.