{"id":19965,"date":"2015-01-02T11:38:00","date_gmt":"2015-01-02T19:38:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/?p=19965"},"modified":"2015-01-02T11:39:30","modified_gmt":"2015-01-02T19:39:30","slug":"iran-has-footballing-spirit-money-cant-buy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/2015\/01\/02\/iran-has-footballing-spirit-money-cant-buy\/","title":{"rendered":"Iran has footballing spirit money can\u2019t buy"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Australian<\/a> – SYDNEY, \u201cIf you go to Iran, you will see football in the DNA of the people,\u201d Iran\u2019s coach Carlos Queiroz tells The Weekend Australian.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cThey have football in the blood. The passion in the people is real. This is our strength. My players have the passion and the spirit to play the game. With the right support like the other nations have, which we do not have, we could reach fantastic levels in football. But without support, \u00adbecause of the financial problems Iran is facing with economic sanctions, it is not possible for us.\u201d<\/p>\n

Iran\u2019s Asian Cup campaign starts tomorrow with a practice match at Wollongong, south of Sydney, against Iraq. Iran versus Iraq. Is this a friendly?<\/p>\n

The far-reaching impact of UN Security Council\u2019s sanctions against Iran for nuclear activities has triggered the slashing of funding and resources for Queiroz\u2019s Team Melli.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe international sanctions are a factor in sport,\u201d he said. \u201cThey\u2019re a factor in the football federation. If you want to play a friendly game, you don\u2019t have money to travel, you don\u2019t have money to buy the tickets, you don\u2019t have money to pay the team. We come to this tournament after one game against (South) Korea in November.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey offered to play us for free, so we took the opportunity. But in our pool in this tournament, we are competing against Bahrain, who have 12 games in the legs. We are playing Qatar, who have 15 games in the legs. UAE have 14 games in the legs from June until now. We can\u2019t do that because we don\u2019t have the resources and we don\u2019t have the support. We have one game in the legs.\u201d<\/p>\n

Thirteen of Queiroz\u2019s 23-man squad are from the Tehran-based Persian Gulf Pro League. It ain\u2019t overly pro.<\/p>\n

\u201cMost of our players are professionals in the sense that they do receive salaries to play football,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut you can\u2019t compare the professionalism in Iran to the professionalism of players competing in England, Germany and Spain. It\u2019s like day and night.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo when you face a team with eight or nine starting players from Bundesliga, with the demands on those players for preparation and intensity and training, you cannot compare them to us.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s like sometimes you can have two cars that look the same, but the power of the \u00adengines is completely different. Players who are used to European football are ready to play 90 minutes at one level, but other players cannot do that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sport is forged on manufactured rivalries. England and New Zealand as real-life foes? Hardly. Australia and Iran after the Socceroos lost a place in the 1998 World Cup when the visitors from Tehran scored two late goals? Not exactly. Ill-feeling and bruising from cricket\u2019s Bodyline series in the 1930s hardly compares to a million casualties during the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s.<\/p>\n

The fall of Saddam Hussein\u2019s regime in 2003 began a normal\u00adisation of relations, but Queiroz conceded a deeper layer of intensity was inevitable between the Persian neighbours.<\/p>\n

\u201cOf course, there is still a lot of pain,\u201d Queiroz said.<\/p>\n

\u201cI can still see and feel that there is a lot of pain, for sure, on both sides. When we play football, those things in the past don\u2019t interfere in the spirit of the game. You can only try to understand that it is the past.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Australian – SYDNEY, \u201cIf you go to Iran, you will see football in the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22614,"featured_media":18851,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[84,91],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19965","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-c47-featured-news","category-c20-other-news"],"views":4797,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19965","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=19965"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19965\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/18851"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19965"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19965"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19965"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}