{"id":31002,"date":"2018-03-05T12:15:37","date_gmt":"2018-03-05T20:15:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/?p=31002"},"modified":"2018-03-05T12:15:37","modified_gmt":"2018-03-05T20:15:37","slug":"afc-acl-2018-group-d-al-ain-vs-esteghlal-preview","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/2018\/03\/05\/afc-acl-2018-group-d-al-ain-vs-esteghlal-preview\/","title":{"rendered":"AFC ACL 2018: Group D &#8211; Al Ain vs. Esteghlal [Preview]"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>AFC &#8211; AL AIN, <strong>The 2016 AFC Champions League runners-up Al Ain will be seeking their first win of the 2018 campaign when they entertain Esteghlal in Group D at Hazza Bin Zayed Stadium on Tuesday.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>The Emirati side, who are without the suspended Mohamed Abdulrahman, have drawn their last two matches, after Al Rayyan left the UAE with a point following Swedish striker Marcus Berg\u2019s opener from the spot two weeks ago.<\/p>\n<p>Esteghlal drew their opening game 2-2 with Al Rayyan then claimed an impressive 1-0 victory over Al Hilal on Matchday Two after Abdullah Al Hafith\u2019s own goal. A positive result in Al Ain would leave the Iranian side in a strong position at the midway point of the group stage.<\/p>\n<p>Al Ain will have happy memories of the last time they met, in the first knockout round last year, when, after Esteghlal won 1-0 in Tehran, the Emirati team stormed back to post a resounding 6-1 home victory to advance 6-2 on aggregate.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>AFC &#8211; AL AIN, The 2016 AFC Champions League runners-up Al Ain will be seeking&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26307,"featured_media":31003,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[90,84,164,136,165],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-31002","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":934,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31002","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=31002"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31002\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31004,"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31002\/revisions\/31004"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/31003"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31002"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31002"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31002"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}