{"id":11280,"date":"2010-06-03T11:03:27","date_gmt":"2010-06-03T18:03:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/2010\/06\/03\/branko-ivankovic-iran-should-be-at-the-world-cup\/"},"modified":"2010-06-03T11:03:27","modified_gmt":"2010-06-03T18:03:27","slug":"branko-ivankovic-iran-should-be-at-the-world-cup","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/2010\/06\/03\/branko-ivankovic-iran-should-be-at-the-world-cup\/","title":{"rendered":"Branko Ivankovic &#8211; Iran Should Be At The World Cup"},"content":{"rendered":"<div style=\"text-align: left;\">GOAL &#8211; <strong>Former Iran coach Branko Ivankovic believes that Iran are still  one of the best <img decoding=\"async\" style=\"margin: 10px; float: right;\" src=\"..\/news\/images\/branko-pfdc1.jpg\" \/>teams in Asia and will be back on the global stage in  2014.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>The Croatian took Team Melli to the 2006 competition in  Germany before stepping down and now he is in charge of Chinese club  Shandong Luneng.<\/p>\n<p>The 56 year-old still has fond memories of his  time in Tehran however.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIran is a football country,\u201d he told  Goal.com. \u201cFootball is very important and the expectations are high.The  team is still a giant in Asia despite the fact that it will not be in  South Africa.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Ivankovic is unsure why Iran failed to qualify for  the upcoming tournament.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI don\u2019t know what happened. When I  left in 2006, Iran were a good team with some very good players. They  should be at the World Cup.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Iran collected just a single point  at the 2006 World Cup amid rumours of dressing room divisions that  Ivankovic was happy to refute.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThere were no problems like that.  We had excelled as a team for four years and had qualified for the  World Cup smoothly and finished third at the 2004 Asian Cup.\u201d<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>GOAL &#8211; Former Iran coach Branko Ivankovic believes that Iran are still one of the&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[86],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11280","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-c13-team-melli-news"],"views":5852,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11280","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11280"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11280\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11280"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11280"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11280"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}