{"id":29811,"date":"2017-11-19T15:53:35","date_gmt":"2017-11-19T23:53:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/?p=29811"},"modified":"2017-11-19T15:57:55","modified_gmt":"2017-11-19T23:57:55","slug":"team-melli-are-my-second-national-team-branko-ivankovic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/2017\/11\/19\/team-melli-are-my-second-national-team-branko-ivankovic\/","title":{"rendered":"Team Melli are my second national team: Branko Ivankovic"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Tehran Times &#8211; TEHRAN, <strong>Persepolis coach Branko Ivankovic says he doesn\u2019t like Iran and Croatia to be drawn into a same group in the 2018 World Cup.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Ivankovic led Iran national football team from 2002 to 2006. The Croat gaffer led Iran to qualify for the 2006 World Cup, where Team Melli failed to advance to the next stage.<\/p>\n<p>Ivankovic earlier led the Croatian national team to a sensational third-placed finish at the 1998 FIFA World Cup finals in France as Ciro Blazevic\u2019s assistant.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIran are my second national team and I would rather not to see Team Melli and Croatia national football team to be drawn into a same group,\u201d Ivankovic said.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI was Croatia coach for seven years and also headed Iran for four years. I prefer two teams just play in friendly matches,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n<p>Persepolis will host Padideh on Monday in Tehran\u2019s Azadi Stadium and Ivankovic believes that they have a difficult task ahead of them.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cPadideh are one of the best teams in the Iran\u2019s league but we have no choice but to beat them. Persepolis want to defend the title,\u201d he concluded.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Tehran Times &#8211; TEHRAN, Persepolis coach Branko Ivankovic says he doesn\u2019t like Iran and Croatia&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26307,"featured_media":29812,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[84,164,136,165,86],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-29811","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-c47-featured-news","category-ipl","category-iran-first-division","category-persian-gulf-pro-league","category-c13-team-melli-news"],"views":1130,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29811","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=29811"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29811\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/29812"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29811"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29811"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29811"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}