{"id":26195,"date":"2016-10-04T13:58:59","date_gmt":"2016-10-04T20:58:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/?p=26195"},"modified":"2016-10-04T13:58:59","modified_gmt":"2016-10-04T20:58:59","slug":"iran-has-tough-task-against-uzbekistan-reza-ghoochannejhad","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/2016\/10\/04\/iran-has-tough-task-against-uzbekistan-reza-ghoochannejhad\/","title":{"rendered":"&#8220;Iran has tough task against Uzbekistan&#8221;: Reza Ghoochannejhad"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Tehran Times &#8211; TASHKENT, <strong>Iran national team striker Reza Ghoochannejhad \u201cGucci\u201d believes that they will have a difficult task against Uzbekistan in 2018 FIFA World Cup qualification tournament.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Team Melli will travel to Tashkent to face Uzbekistan on October 6 and will host South Korea five days later in Tehran\u2019s Azadi Stadium.<\/p>\n<p>Iran has been drawn along with South Korea, Uzbekistan, China, Qatar and Syria in Group A of the third round of the competition.<\/p>\n<p>Asian powerhouse Japan has been pitted against Australia, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Iraq and Thailand in Group B.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI have been added to the national team Sunday night but I\u2019ve heard our players have prepared well in their training camp in Armenia,\u201d Ghoochannejhad said.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe know how Uzbekistan is a good team, that\u2019s why they sit top of Group A. We\u2019ve already played against them and lost to them in Tehran, unfortunately,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n<p>Asked him if he is fully-ready to play against Uzbekistan, Ghoochannejhad said, \u201cI had a tough day with SC Heerenveen but I am pretty sure I will be ready on Thursday,\u201d Gucchi stated.<\/p>\n<p>The winner and runner-up of each group (four teams in total) will qualify for the 2018 FIFA World Cup, while the third-placed teams of each group (two teams in total) will head to the play-off round of the 2018 FIFA World Cup qualifiers.<\/p>\n<p>The winner of the Asian play-off round will then face twice the fourth-placed squad in the fifth round of the Confederation of North, Central America and Caribbean Association Football (CONCACAF) qualifying games.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Tehran Times &#8211; TASHKENT, Iran national team striker Reza Ghoochannejhad \u201cGucci\u201d believes that they will&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26307,"featured_media":26196,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[90,84,91,93,86,110],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-26195","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-c17-asian-competitions","category-c47-featured-news","category-c20-other-news","category-c22-players-spotlight","category-c13-team-melli-news","category-world-cup"],"views":1933,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26195","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=26195"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26195\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/26196"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26195"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26195"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26195"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}