{"id":11155,"date":"2010-04-15T11:18:24","date_gmt":"2010-04-15T18:18:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/2010\/04\/15\/esteghlal-2-1-al-ahli\/"},"modified":"2010-04-15T11:18:24","modified_gmt":"2010-04-15T18:18:24","slug":"esteghlal-2-1-al-ahli","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/2010\/04\/15\/esteghlal-2-1-al-ahli\/","title":{"rendered":"Esteghlal 2 &#8211; 1 Al Ahli"},"content":{"rendered":"<div style=\"text-align: left;\"><img decoding=\"async\" style=\"float: right;\" src=\"http:\/\/images.the-afc.com\/afc\/comps\/acl\/2010\/300x200\/esteghlal_al_ahli_md5_3x2.jpg\" \/>AFC &#8211; Tehran, <strong>Esteghlal qualified for the last 16 of the AFC Champions League  as goals from Mehdi Salehi and Amirhossein Saghedi sealed a 2-1 win over  Al Ahli in Group A. <\/strong><\/p>\n<p>The early exchanges produced little in the way of clear-cut  chances although Marcinho saw a 30-yard free-kick fumbled round the post  by keeper Mohammad Mohammadi after 10 minutes.<\/p>\n<p>However, the home  fans were celebrating in the 24th minute when Majidi evaded a tackle  and then found Salehi\u2019s run with a fine reverse ball that the forward  subsequently buried into the back of the net.<\/p>\n<p>Al Ahli looked to  hit back and Simoes saw a low, left-foot strike turned around the post  in the 34th minute. Esteghlal cleared the resulting corner but Faraj  Darwish won a header on the edge of the box and as the ball came back  in, Akbarpour barged into Al Abdullah and the referee pointed to the  spot.<\/p>\n<p>Simoes ran up, stopped, faked to shoot and then stroked the  ball into the bottom corner with Mohammadi completely off balance to  level the encounter.<\/p>\n<p>Esteghlal came close to regaining the lead  in the 43rd minute when Al Mosailem spilled Khosro Heydari\u2019s cross,  Majidi\u2019s effort was blocked and when the ball came back out to Heydari,  his shot was deflected narrowly wide.<\/p>\n<p>However, Januario\u2019s  subsequent corner left Al Mosailem in no man\u2019s land after the keeper had  decided to come for the ball and Sadeghi jumped above a crowd of  players to head into the unguarded net.<\/p>\n<p>Heydari saw another  strike deflected narrowly wide at the start of the second period and  Sadeghi directed a downward header from another Januario corner straight  at the Al Ahli keeper on the hour mark.<\/p>\n<p>Marcinho curled another  set piece narrowly wide of the far post from 20 yards in the 69th minute  before substitute Arash Borhani wasted a good chance to put the result  beyond doubt with six minutes remaining.<\/p>\n<p>The striker raced clear  of the Al Ahli defence to latch on to Mohsen Yousefi\u2019 s long ball but  tried to take the ball around Al Mosailem but dallied too long, allowing  the visitors to recover as Jufain Al Bishi cleared his eventual shot  off the line.<\/p>\n<p>Hossein Kazemi saw a long-range free-kick drift  narrowly wide before Al Ahli gave the hosts a scare as the final whistle  approached when Abdulrahim Jezawi burst into the box past two defenders  but Mohammadi saved well at his near post.<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>AFC &#8211; Tehran, Esteghlal qualified for the last 16 of the AFC Champions League as&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22615,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[90],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11155","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-c17-asian-competitions"],"views":2907,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11155","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/22615"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11155"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11155\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11155"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11155"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11155"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}