{"id":22761,"date":"2015-09-29T15:32:18","date_gmt":"2015-09-29T22:32:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/?p=22761"},"modified":"2015-09-29T17:12:20","modified_gmt":"2015-09-30T00:12:20","slug":"waff-2015-qatar-saudi-favourites-to-reach-final-mohamed-khakpour","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/2015\/09\/29\/waff-2015-qatar-saudi-favourites-to-reach-final-mohamed-khakpour\/","title":{"rendered":"2015 WAFF U-23: &#8220;Qatar, Saudi favourites to reach final&#8221; &#8211;  Mohamed Khakpour"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The Peninsula &#8211; DOHA,  <strong>Iran coach Mohamed Khakpour picked Qatar and Saudi Arabia as the two teams will reach the final of the U23 West Asian Football Federation (WAFF) championship which kicks off today at the Lekhwiya Stadium.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>\u201cI think the tournament is a strong one, we have a strong group,\u201d said Khakpour while speaking to journalists on the eve of the championship here yesterday.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe reason we are here is because we are trying to make a model of the tournament that we will be play in a few months time he said referring to the January U23 Asian Cup which will serve as a qualifier for the Olympics. <\/p>\n<p>\u201cTeams like Saudi Arabia and Qatar have the ability to be in the final. We are looking to perform well and look at the performance of our young players.\u201d Saudi Arabia and Bahrain are Iran\u2019s opponent in Group B. Iran start with a match against Bahrain tomorrow. \bThe Peninsula<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Peninsula &#8211; DOHA, Iran coach Mohamed Khakpour picked Qatar and Saudi Arabia as the&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26307,"featured_media":22762,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[90,84,139,86,133],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-22761","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-c17-asian-competitions","category-c47-featured-news","category-irans-u23","category-c13-team-melli-news","category-c14-youth-teams"],"views":2873,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22761","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\/26307"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22761"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22761\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22762"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22761"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22761"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22761"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}