{"id":30022,"date":"2017-12-11T10:12:12","date_gmt":"2017-12-11T18:12:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/?p=30022"},"modified":"2017-12-11T10:12:12","modified_gmt":"2017-12-11T18:12:12","slug":"ex-iran-defender-optimistic-about-team-mellis-chances-in-world-cup","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/2017\/12\/11\/ex-iran-defender-optimistic-about-team-mellis-chances-in-world-cup\/","title":{"rendered":"Ex-Iran defender optimistic about Team Melli&#8217;s chances in World Cup"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Tasnim &#8211; TEHRAN, <strong>Former Iranian national football team defender Reza Shahrudi said Team Melli has been drawn in a tough group but could qualify for the next stage.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Team Melli has been pitted against Spain, Portugal and Morocco in Group B of the 2018 World Cup.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cHowever, we are in the Group B and will have to deal with the best European and African teams,\u201d Shahrudi told Sputnik.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cOur opening game is with Morocco which I think is the best African team you can find these days. The opening game is always the hardest,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cPortugal is the one of the best around and Spain won the 2010 World Cup and has a star-studded lineup. These three outfits will be a big challenge for us, but we still hope that our guys, or sports officials and all our football fans will keep their fingers crossed so that next summer in Russia we are lucky,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Tasnim &#8211; TEHRAN, Former Iranian national football team defender Reza Shahrudi said Team Melli has&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26307,"featured_media":30023,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[84,142,91,93,86,110],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-30022","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-c47-featured-news","category-memory-lane","category-c20-other-news","category-c22-players-spotlight","category-c13-team-melli-news","category-world-cup"],"views":1035,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30022","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=30022"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30022\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/30023"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30022"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30022"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30022"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}