{"id":30783,"date":"2018-02-12T12:18:30","date_gmt":"2018-02-12T20:18:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/?p=30783"},"modified":"2018-02-12T12:20:40","modified_gmt":"2018-02-12T20:20:40","slug":"first-match-the-toughest-branko-ivankovic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/2018\/02\/12\/first-match-the-toughest-branko-ivankovic\/","title":{"rendered":"First match the toughest: Branko Ivankovic"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Tehran Times &#8211; TEHRAN, <strong>Persepolis coach Branko Ivankovic says the first match in a tournament can be the most difficult match.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Persepolis football team will host Uzbekistan\u2019s Nasaf Qarshi in Group C of the 2018 AFC Champions League in Tehran\u2019s Azadi Stadium on Tuesday.<\/p>\n<p>The Iranian giants\u2019 outstanding form led them to achieve their best AFC Champions League performance ever in reaching the semi-final last year.<\/p>\n<p>Persepolis also are on the verge of retaining their title in the Iranian league.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cPlaying in the AFC Champions League is a great honor for me and I am very happy we play in front of our fans at home this year. I expect our fans to be our 12th man on Tuesday,\u201d Ivankovic said in the pre-match news conference.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cExperience has proved to me that the first match always is the hardest match. We respect Nasaf and know that the Uzbek team have won four matches out of their five matches,\u201d the Croat added.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cNasf are a well-organized team and are among the country\u2019s top four but we are also ready to meet them.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cFor us is very important to begin the campaign with a win but we&#8217;re not taking anything for granted. We qualified for the ACL semis last year and it\u2019s normal we are going to repeat our success in the current season,\u201d Ivankovic stated.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe\u2019ve analyzed Nasaf in the previous days and I also know they\u2019ve analyzed us but we believe in what we do and I am sure our players prove their potential,\u201d the Persepolis coach concluded.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Tehran Times &#8211; TEHRAN, Persepolis coach Branko Ivankovic says the first match in a tournament&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26307,"featured_media":21074,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[90,84,164,136,165],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-30783","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-c17-asian-competitions","category-c47-featured-news","category-ipl","category-iran-first-division","category-persian-gulf-pro-league"],"views":804,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30783","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=30783"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30783\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30789,"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30783\/revisions\/30789"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21074"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30783"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30783"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30783"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}