{"id":28893,"date":"2017-08-27T21:56:40","date_gmt":"2017-08-28T04:56:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/?p=28893"},"modified":"2017-08-27T21:56:40","modified_gmt":"2017-08-28T04:56:40","slug":"sports-minister-soltanifar-hopes-for-good-world-cup-draw","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/2017\/08\/27\/sports-minister-soltanifar-hopes-for-good-world-cup-draw\/","title":{"rendered":"Sports Minister Soltanifar hopes for good World Cup draw"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Tasnim &#8211; TEHRAN, <strong>Minister of Sports and Youth Affairs Masoud Soltanifar hopes that the Iranian football team book a place in the 2018 World Cup next stage.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>The Iranian National Football Team (also known as Team Melli) is the first Asian team who has already qualified for the prestigious event.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cFirst, I hope we have a good draw in the 2018 World Cup. Then we will have to qualify for the next stage for the first time,\u201d Soltanifar said in an interview with Iran\u2019s state-run TV.  <\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe are going to arrange about seven warm-up matches for Team Melli as part of the preparation for the World Cup. We want to show a good performance in the competition in accordance with our dignity,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cAfter the World Cup, we will focus on the 2018 Asian games since we want to make history in the competition.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;In the Olympics, we have claimed medals just in four sports so far. Iran has won medals in weightlifting, wrestling, taekwondo and athletic and we hope to win medals in more sports,\u201d Soltanifar said.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe\u2019ve been focusing on the area of women\u2019s sports development over the past nine months and I think we have so many talented sportswomen in our country. Kimia Alizadeh won a medal in the 2016 Olympic Games and I think our women are capable of winning three medals in the upcoming Olympics,\u201d the minister concluded.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Tasnim &#8211; TEHRAN, Minister of Sports and Youth Affairs Masoud Soltanifar hopes that the Iranian&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26307,"featured_media":28894,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[84,91,86,110],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-28893","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-c47-featured-news","category-c20-other-news","category-c13-team-melli-news","category-world-cup"],"views":3056,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28893","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=28893"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28893\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/28894"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28893"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28893"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28893"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}