Iran defeated Wales in a big game with major ramifications for Group B. Gareth Bale said the loss was “difficult to take”.
England, Wales and the US’ group-stage opponents Iran have been in Austria this week to play their final tune-up games before the World Cup, but back home, the country has been in turmoil.
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The killing of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old woman who was allegedly beaten to death in police custody after being arrested for not wearing a hijab properly, has led to extensive protests and more deaths.
Before Iran’s game against Senegal, the starting XI wore plain black jackets to express their solidarity with the protesters at home. It was an extraordinary moment.
Incredible: With demonstrations roiling Iran, Iranian National team cover Iranian logos during national anthem ahead of final game before World Cup. A courageous public show of support for the Protestors. Football as a force of good 🇮🇷 🙌https://t.co/L4up43xKpE
— roger bennett (@rogbennett) September 27, 2022
Voicing political opinions contrary to those of the state often doesn’t go well for Iranian footballers. Voria Ghafouri, a former national team player, was released by his club Esteghlal earlier this year after repeatedly criticising the government, in particular over the rights of women to attend football matches. It was therefore a pleasant surprise when, on Sunday, the striker Sardar Azmoun posted a message on his Instagram in support of those protesting back home.
“Because of the law of the national team,” read the post, “we couldn’t say anything until the end of the camp, but I couldn’t take it anymore.
“The ultimate punishment is to be kicked out of the national team, which is a small price to pay for even a single strand of Iranian women’s hair.
“Shame on you. You kill them so easily. Long live Iranian women.”
The post was taken down shortly afterwards. In fact, Azmoun deleted all of his Instagram posts and replaced his profile picture with a black circle. Many of the other players in the team have done similar with their profile pictures. Two fans were ejected from the Uruguay game (which was theoretically behind closed doors) for holding up banners supporting the protests, and an extremely loud group with a very effective megaphone demonstrated outside the Senegal match, which finished 1-1.
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Against this backdrop, then, how much does football really matter in the wider scheme of things?
It’s hard to say what role the game plays at a time like this. A necessary escape, some sort of representation of the good in a nation? Or an irrelevance, something that nobody can possibly pay serious attention to while things are as they are?
There’s no answer, really. No good answer, at least.
All the Iran team can do is keep playing, use their voice and hope that tomorrow is better.
Read more: Iran World Cup 2022 squad guide: Protests, a grudge match and football’s longest throw
Iran qualified for the World Cup in Qatar ostensibly in some style, recovering from a mid-campaign slump to finish top of their final group.
But recent good results hid a deeper dissatisfaction with coach Dragan Skocic’s tactics and methods, something that came to a head in the summer when Skocic was sacked, reinstated six days later, then sacked again shortly afterwards, with little more than a couple of months to go before the tournament.
In came a familiar face to lay a steadying hand on the tiller: Carlos Queiroz had taken Iran to the World Cup in 2014 and 2018, and after his reappointment to the role will become just the second man in history to take a single country other than his own to three different World Cups.
After a sojourn away from Iran which brought him mixed success — he was sacked by Colombia after a 6-1 defeat to Ecuador put their World Cup prospects in jeopardy, but he was a couple of penalty shootouts away from winning the Africa Cup of Nations and qualification for Qatar with Egypt — Queiroz is back with the team he led 100 times between 2011 and 2019.
“When the family call you home, all you do is simply just show up,” said Queiroz, when his reappointment was confirmed.
When the family call you home, all you do is simply just show up. Fully committed to your duties and ready for the Mission.
Lets do it together Lads!
To the future!Thank you so much Team Melli pic.twitter.com/H6C0D0zIsP
— Carlos Queiroz (@Carlos_Queiroz) September 13, 2022
In theory, it’s not exactly the ideal way to prepare for a global tournament, a significant gamble to change managers such a short time before the planes to Doha take off. But in this case, the sense is that it would have been a bigger gamble not to make a change.
Skocic can make a solid case that he has been roughly treated. He won all but two of the World Cup qualifiers he was in charge for (the only defeat being a dead rubber against South Korea) and cleared up a mess left by a calamitous six months in charge from Marc Wilmots. Yet while things looked good on paper, on grass it wasn’t quite as rosy.
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“Yes, he got the results, but the performances…” says Arya Allahverdi, host of the Gol Bezan podcast about Iranian football. “If you look at the matches and watch them individually, Iran never really played that well. It was a complete contrast to the previous qualification, in which the results were similar but the performances were much better.”
However, most of his undoing came off the pitch. Under Skocic, divides had been growing among the players, with different factions favouring the Croat and others angling for a change. There were suggestions that a delegation of players had approached the federation and directly asked for a change in management, and even though The Athletic understands that is not quite the case, there didn’t exactly need to be a clandestine meeting to gauge the mood. That some of the players wanted Skocic out had been clear for some time.
This divide was played out, rather embarrassingly, on Instagram when Azmoun posted a message that heavily implied the whole squad was behind Skocic, shortly after he was reinstated.
“We will work together with the technical staff to make the hearts of the Iranian people happy in the Qatar World Cup,” he said, “and trust us and the national team in this critical and short period. The World Cup should be fully supported. We, the players, ask you not to change anything.”
In response, some of the players who were perhaps not so enamoured with Skocic, including captain Ehsan Hajsafi, posted their own messages, the general tone of which could be summarised as “you don’t speak for all of us, kid”. Azmoun’s post has subsequently been taken down.
Alireza Jahanbakhsh, the former Brighton winger who is a key member of the squad, was relatively cagey about the specifics of the divide when speaking to The Athletic, but was surprisingly candid as he accepted there were pro and anti-Skocic factions.
“Some players didn’t have a good relationship with the coach,” he said. “They didn’t like the way he was playing. Some players had a very good relationship. Usually, in my experience, that’s kept in the team.
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“Things that happened were unprofessional. I can’t mention names, but there were people from outside who wanted to really affect the national team in terms of decisions and stuff.
“Unfortunately, there were players who followed that up, which was quite sad. We, as some of the more experienced players, tried to calm it down.
“We said, ‘Okay, we’ll stay right in the middle, it’s not our decision’. Now is not the time to be messing up things. That just affects us in a negative way. Thank God, everything now is more calm and settled.”
As well as reports of lax training sessions, the standard of opponents was another issue. Take the international break last summer, which turned into something of a farce: one of the two planned friendlies, against Canada, was called off, leaving a fixture against Algeria as the sole match, but the Algerians played a B or even C team. Not exactly the sort of stiff competition a team might need with only a couple more matches to come before the World Cup, the punchline being that Iran lost 2-1. It turned out to be Skocic’s last game in charge.
Skocic was a divisive choice from the start, partly because some demanded a native coach back in 2020, partly because he had been managing in the Iranian second tier only six months before his appointment.
This all added to the sense that Skocic lacked the authority to really hold the respect of many in the squad, particularly with some of the bigger names. “He wasn’t a strong manager,” said a source close to the squad, who asked not to be named to protect his relationship with the team. “If he had stayed on, it would’ve been too difficult to salvage it,” says Allahverdi.
Players like Porto’s Mehdi Taremi and Jahanbakhsh play in the Champions League and Europa League: they are used to a higher standard of competition, facilities and attitude. The sense among the anti-Skocic faction was that he simply didn’t live up to those standards.
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And then there was the interview that Skocic gave to Croatian media in which he appeared to cast doubt on the tactical nous of the Iranian players. When you write it all down like that, you a) half wonder how he lasted as long as he did but b) have to remind yourself that he led Iran to qualification in relatively handy fashion, results were generally good and he was by no means universally unpopular.
Queiroz, however, is much more widely liked, especially in the squad. “We worked with him for seven, eight years,” says Jahanbakhsh. “He knows the players really well, the players know him really well. He brought me into the national team at a very early age and made my dream come true playing in two World Cups.”
The knocks against Queiroz from his initial spell were firstly that he often didn’t have a Plan B (they never came from behind to win a competitive game in his eight years in charge), and that Plan A tended to be pretty defensive, even negative. That’s not necessarily a surprise given that, at the World Cup at least, Iran will usually be an underdog, but it was a mindset not exactly conducive to rapid change.
Reading too much into friendly games is always a tricky business, but it was notable that Queiroz set up Iran in a 4-1-4-1 formation in both their recent friendlies against Uruguay and Senegal. Again, not a huge shock, but it might mean he will have to leave out one of arguably their two best players.
In Taremi and Azmoun, they have a pair of strikers playing and scoring at high levels of European football, Taremi in particular: he has 49 goals over the last two full seasons with Porto, and has five from his first seven games this season, too.
Azmoun isn’t quite as hot, struggling for game time and goals at Bayer Leverkusen after moving there from Zenit St Petersburg in January, but he still has 41 international strikes to his name. Azmoun started the 1-0 win over Uruguay and Taremi started the draw with Senegal: in both games, one replaced the other, and in both games, the substitute scored.
You can file picking between those two under ‘nice problem to have’. There are a few options out wide, too: Jahanbakhsh might not have ripped it up at Brighton, but he’s started the season with Feyenoord well and will start on one flank, while on the other you might see Ali Gholizadeh or Mehdi Torabi, or maybe even Taremi.
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However, the cupboard is a little more bare in other areas of the team. Just after he was reappointed, Queiroz sat down for an interview with Iran360, before which the presenter jokingly asked whether he could play up front. “Forwards, we have too many,” Queiroz replied. “Defenders, midfielders, we need.”
He was joking, but he wasn’t really joking. The heart of the team is where the problems might be. Saman Ghoddos is likely to be one of the more advanced midfielders, and while you could argue whether his lack of playing time at Brentford is a positive or negative (will he be rusty or well-rested?), he’s unlikely to strike fear into the hearts of many.
Omid Ebrahimi is a stalwart but he’s now 35, and against Uruguay Saeid Ezatolahi, who sat at the base of midfield, often left plenty of space for the opposition attackers to exploit. The heart of defence could be an issue, too: Hossein Kanani is a beefy presence but one you sense has a mistake or two in him, while Shojae Khalilzadeh is, like Ebrahimi, knocking on a bit.
Then again, what does it matter given what is going on at home?
(Additional reporting: Alexander Abnos, Andy Naylor)
(Top photos: Getty Images/Design: Eamonn Dalton)
