{"id":33438,"date":"2018-09-14T13:42:42","date_gmt":"2018-09-14T20:42:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/?p=33438"},"modified":"2018-09-14T13:42:42","modified_gmt":"2018-09-14T20:42:42","slug":"from-russia-to-reading-fc-saeid-ezatolahi-set-to-finally-arrive-at-hogwood-this-weekend","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/2018\/09\/14\/from-russia-to-reading-fc-saeid-ezatolahi-set-to-finally-arrive-at-hogwood-this-weekend\/","title":{"rendered":"From Russia to Reading FC: Saeid Ezatolahi set to finally arrive at Hogwood this weekend"},"content":{"rendered":"

Wokingham.Today – READING, From Rostov to Reading, via Belgium, Uzbekistan and France.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The deal to bring Saeid Ezatolahi to Reading has been far from straightforward, but the Iranian international is set to finally arrive in England this weekend.<\/p>\n

The 21-year-old completed his season-long loan move from Russian outfit FC Rostov on August 31, the final day of the summer transfer window.<\/p>\n

But he is yet to arrive at Hogwood with all previous stages of the deal completed elsewhere across the globe.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe hasn\u2019t reported yet,\u201d explained Royals boss Paul Clement.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs we speak (on Thursday afternoon), he is in Paris.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe was on international duty with Iran and they played Uzbekistan. He played a good, significant amount of the game and he set up the goal, so that\u2019s good.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe is in Paris to get his visa. Everything is in place now, the visa has been approved and we\u2019re just waiting for it to be collected.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo he\u2019s got to go back to the office to collect it, that\u2019ll probably be on Friday and then he\u2019s free to travel to the UK.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe expect him to arrive here either Friday or Saturday. He\u2019ll do some light training on Saturday, on Sunday the players are off and he\u2019ll start fully with everybody on Monday.\u201d<\/p>\n

Clement added: \u201cAfter the World Cup he had some rest time. He did go back to Russia, Rostov for a couple of weeks where he was training and then there has been a period where he hasn\u2019t been there and he\u2019s been back in Iran.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe lost a little bit of time but fortunately during this period where he was with the national team, clearly he\u2019s been training and he\u2019s already played a game.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo he might need a bit of time, but I don\u2019t think he\u2019ll need that much. I\u2019ll assess it as soon as I see him.\u201d<\/p>\n

Paul Clement insists there are no problems behind the scenes at Reading<\/p>\n

The announcement of Ezatolahi\u2019s arrival came as a surprise to many, with the deal accelerated during the final week of the transfer window.<\/p>\n

Reading had been chasing Swansea City midfielder Jay Fulton on a permanent deal, but when that fell through they moved to snap up Ezatolahi on loan.<\/p>\n

But Clement hopes that could turn into a longer term deal.<\/p>\n

\u201cI hope he has a long future here,\u201d said the Reading manager.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe situation with the deal at the moment is he\u2019s on a loan for the season because when we signed him, it was obviously outside the period where we could do a permanent, so it\u2019s on an initial loan.<\/p>\n

\u201cHopefully he does really well and it\u2019s a long-term thing.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was brought to my attention late in the window. We had a week. During that week it was about gathering as much intelligence as possible, speaking to people he had worked with.<\/p>\n

\u201cFortunately I was able to have a good conversation with Carlos Queiroz (Iran\u2019s national team boss), who spoke really highly of him.<\/p>\n

\u201cThen I spoke to the player and got a really good feel about him and we\u2019re really pleased to get it over the line.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was a little bit complicated. You\u2019re dealing with Russia, you\u2019ve got the situation where he\u2019s Iranian so you\u2019ve got the visa issues, international clearance and those type of things.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe had his medical in Belgium at Roeselare because it was difficult to get him here to do the medical because of the visa, but in the end we got it over the line.<\/p>\n

\u201cA really complicated deal.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re looking forward to working with him. I think he\u2019s going to be a good addition to us.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Wokingham.Today – READING, From Rostov to Reading, via Belgium, Uzbekistan and France. The deal to…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26307,"featured_media":33439,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[84,89,93,86],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-33438","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-c47-featured-news","category-c16-iranian-legionairs","category-c22-players-spotlight","category-c13-team-melli-news"],"views":889,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33438","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=33438"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33438\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33440,"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33438\/revisions\/33440"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/33439"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33438"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33438"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33438"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}