{"id":16796,"date":"2014-01-03T07:49:24","date_gmt":"2014-01-03T15:49:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/?p=16796"},"modified":"2014-01-03T07:49:24","modified_gmt":"2014-01-03T15:49:24","slug":"afazeli-i-did-not-want-to-turn-my-back-on-team-omid","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/2014\/01\/03\/afazeli-i-did-not-want-to-turn-my-back-on-team-omid\/","title":{"rendered":"Afazeli: I did not want to turn my back on Team Omid"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Persianfootball.com \u2013 TEHRAN, <strong>After accepting the task of becoming Iran\u2019s u-22 coach, Human Afazeli said, that under the given circumstances he did not want to turn his back on Team Omid.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>In an interview with the Iranian Students\u2019 News Agency (ISNA), Afazeli indicated it is a hard task to succeed Mansourian with the depleted u-22 squad in the upcoming finals of the AFC u-22 Championship 2014 that will kick off on January 11 in Muscat, Oman.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Our aim is to participate in the AFC u-22 Asian Cup so that Team Melli will not be eliminated from preliminaries of Argentina 2016 Olympic Games&#8221;, Afazeli said.<\/p>\n<p>The Team Melli u-22 coach acknowledged Iran is grouped with Japan, Australia and Kuwait, which is a very hard group and there is no guarantee that Iran could advance even with full u-22 squad.<\/p>\n<p>Afazeli noted, the Iranian football Federation (IFF) assured him that the recently announced u-22 squad made of 23 players will remain the same despite the fact that Naft of Tehran is against releasing its selected three players.<\/p>\n<p>The former Team Melli assistant coach also mentioned beside Mansourian who resigned the rest of the technical staff who are very familiar with u-22 players will remain intact and all will accompany Team Melli to Oman.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Although the u-22 is depleted, yet our job is to participate in the AFC u-22 Asian Cup and do our best for Iran&#8221;, Afazeli concluded. &#8220;We need the people and media to stand behind us and leave the rest until we return.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Persianfootball.com \u2013 TEHRAN, After accepting the task of becoming Iran\u2019s u-22 coach, Human Afazeli said,&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":25049,"featured_media":11962,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[90,84,86],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16796","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-c17-asian-competitions","category-c47-featured-news","category-c13-team-melli-news"],"views":2775,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16796","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\/25049"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16796"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16796\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11962"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16796"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16796"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16796"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}