AIFF Media Team

NEW DELHI: Twelve teams are set to contest the final round of the Hero 27th Senior Women’s National Football Championship 2022-23 - six winners from the group stages, four best second-placed teams, hosts Punjab and direct seeds Railways.

The group stage featured 30 teams divided into six groups and was played across six centralised venues - Amritsar, Haldwani, Margao, Bhilai, Mathura and Bengaluru. It began on March 25, 2023, and ended on April 9, 2023.

Haryana (Group I), Maharashtra (Group II), Himachal Pradesh (Group III), Jharkhand (Group IV), Tamil Nadu (Group V), Manipur (Group VI) have qualified for the final round as group winners.

Chandigarh (Group II), Karnataka (Group VI), West Bengal (Group V) and Odisha (Group III) advanced to the final round as the four best second-placed teams.

Since all groups did not consist of a similar number of teams, in deciding the four second-best teams from all the groups, all participating teams were compared across the same number of matches as per AFC norms. The number of matches which were identified was equal to that played in the group with the lower number of matches per participating team. As Group I and Group V consisted of 4 (four) teams each, the number of matches identified was 3 (three) for normalisation.

In the final round of the Hero 27th Senior Women’s National Football Championship 2022-23, teams will be divided into two groups of six. Group matches will be played in a single round-robin format, with the top two teams from each group qualifying for the semi-finals.