{"id":32465,"date":"2018-06-22T17:21:46","date_gmt":"2018-06-23T00:21:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/?p=32465"},"modified":"2018-06-22T17:21:46","modified_gmt":"2018-06-23T00:21:46","slug":"portugal-have-many-stars-but-we-can-defeat-them-as-a-team-karim-ansarifard","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/2018\/06\/22\/portugal-have-many-stars-but-we-can-defeat-them-as-a-team-karim-ansarifard\/","title":{"rendered":"Portugal have many stars but we can defeat them as a team: Karim Ansarifard"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Tehran Times &#8211; SARANSK, <strong>Iran national football team striker Karim Ansarifard believes Team Melli will defeat Portugal and qualify for the 2018 World Cup knockout stage.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Despite their defeat against La Roja, Iran&#8217;s fate is still in their own hands. Whatever happens in Spain&#8217;s final group match against Morocco, the Iranians know that a win over Portugal will see them into the round of 16.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe\u2019ve learned so many things from the previous World Cup and know how to play Portugal in this edition,\u201d Ansarifard said.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIran is led by the best coach in the world and he has taught us how to fight against our opponents. He has helped us a lot and we are ready to defeat Portugal in our last group match,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n<p>Iran lost to Spain in Group B but Ansarifard says Iran played well and didn\u2019t deserve to lose.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cAfter conceding the goal, we created so many chances. We did our best but I think we were not lucky at the end of the match. We will fight for our pride in the match against Portugal,\u201d Olympiakos striker added.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cOur strategy against Spain was to defend and we wanted to find the back of their net through the counter attack. We also created some scoring chances but lacked the cutting edge,\u201d the former Persepolis striker added.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cPortugal team have many stars but we can defeat them as a team,\u201d Ansarifard concluded.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Tehran Times &#8211; SARANSK, Iran national football team striker Karim Ansarifard believes Team Melli will&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26307,"featured_media":32466,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[84,92,89,93,86,110],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-32465","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-c47-featured-news","category-c21-international-football-news","category-c16-iranian-legionairs","category-c22-players-spotlight","category-c13-team-melli-news","category-world-cup"],"views":1295,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32465","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=32465"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32465\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":32467,"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32465\/revisions\/32467"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/32466"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32465"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32465"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32465"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}