Booters' long journey begins tomorrow

The 18-member Bangladesh football team will leave Dhaka tomorrow afternoon for Bangkok en route to Dushanbe to play their second leg match of the 2010 World Cup pre-qualifiers against Tajikistan.
Syed Nayeemuddin's boys will start directly from their residential camp at BKSP to board a Thai Airways flight at 1.30pm at the Zia International Airport.
The team will fly to Uzbekistan from the Thailand capital for a stopover at Tashkent, informed Bangladesh Football Federation (BFF) officials last night.
Much to the relief of the footballers, the journey will be shortened as they will not have to travel from Tashkent to Dushanbe by road as it had been earlier learned.
They will have to take a two-hour drive from the Uzbek capital before boarding a domestic flight for Dushanbe, where they reach on October 25.
The trip, involving a series of breaks which forced the team to get visas for Thailand as well as Uzbekistan, is going to cost the BFF a massive 23-24 lakh Taka.
The away match will be played on October 28 with Bangladesh needing to beat the Central Asians or at least draw 2-2 to reach the second stage of Asian qualifiers for the South Africa World Cup.
The weather forecast for the period Bangladesh will stay in the former Soviet state, however, is bad news for the visitors who will face bitter cold. The temperature is expected to fall as low as three degrees (Celsius) with prediction of rain, which could make things worse.
Bangladesh drew 1-1 with the Tajiks in the first leg on October 8 at home with heavy showers and an unstable pitch helping the hosts who had lost all three previous games to their World Cup bane Tajikistan, who had won 2-0 and 2-0 in the pre-qualifiers for the 2006 World Cup in 2003 and 6-1 in the AFC Challenge Cup in Dhaka last year.