{"id":12330,"date":"2011-08-01T17:42:22","date_gmt":"2011-08-02T00:42:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/2011\/08\/01\/bahrain-coach-circumspect-on-chances\/"},"modified":"2011-08-01T17:42:22","modified_gmt":"2011-08-02T00:42:22","slug":"bahrain-coach-circumspect-on-chances","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/2011\/08\/01\/bahrain-coach-circumspect-on-chances\/","title":{"rendered":"Bahrain coach circumspect on chances"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" style=\"float: right;\" alt=\"bahrain\" src=\"http:\/\/images.the-afc.com\/afc\/comps\/fifa_comps\/worldcup_2014\/qualifiers\/bahrain_national_3x2.jpg\" height=\"220\" width=\"330\" \/>AFC &#8211; MANAMA, <strong>Bahrain\u2019s English coach Peter John Taylor has tamped down media  suggestions that the West Asians are favourites to advance out of their  group into the 2014 FIFA World Cup qualifiers final round.<\/strong> <\/p>\n<p>The Bahrainis were placed alongside Iran, Qatar and Indonesia in  the draw for the third round (round-robin, home and away) on Saturday.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;It&#8217;s a tough group, each of our opponents are good teams,&#8221; Taylor told the local media.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;I  don&#8217;t know how anybody can classify us amongst the favourites. Right  now, the FIFA World Rankings have Iran and Qatar ahead of us, and I&#8217;ve  also been given mixed feedback from different people around the team;  some say it&#8217;s an easy group, while others say it&#8217;s going to be very  difficult, so not even they can decide on what to expect.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;The  main thing for us right now is that we focus on being the best prepared  we can be. We must respect all our opposition, and hopefully we can go  out and do well and try our best to qualify for the next phase.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>The  Englishman added: \u201cTraining been very good so far. We&#8217;ve had at least  10 sessions here with our players and the fitness level is now much  better than when we started.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Bahrain captain Mohamed Salmeen said the pool was very tough.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI  think our group is very hard and it will be very difficult to qualify  from this group. But we are used to playing difficult matches in  difficult groups and we have qualified twice for the play-offs,\u201d said  Salmeen, referring to his side\u2019s close brush with the World Cup Finals  in 2006 and 2010 when they lost in the confederation-level play-offs.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe want to do again what we did before, and this time we want to reach the World Cup.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIran  is one of the big teams in Asia, while Bahrain and Qatar are advancing  and producing very good performance lately, while everyone should  respect Indonesia who will be strong competitors,\u201d added Salmeen.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>AFC &#8211; MANAMA, Bahrain\u2019s English coach Peter John Taylor has tamped down media suggestions that&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22614,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[90],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12330","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-c17-asian-competitions"],"views":3464,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12330","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\/22614"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12330"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12330\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12330"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12330"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12330"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}