{"id":37945,"date":"2019-11-13T21:15:36","date_gmt":"2019-11-14T05:15:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/?p=37945"},"modified":"2019-11-13T21:15:36","modified_gmt":"2019-11-14T05:15:36","slug":"when-politics-and-football-meet-iraq-vs-iran","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/2019\/11\/13\/when-politics-and-football-meet-iraq-vs-iran\/","title":{"rendered":"When politics and football meet &#8211; Iraq vs Iran"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>iNews.co.uk &#8211; LONDON, <strong>The international break before Christmas is traditionally one that yawns wide open as fans are deprived of a fortnight of club football\u00a0action, with little excitement on the TV to replace it.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But there are games out there worth watching &#8211; you&#8217;ve just got to know where to find them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So this game might not be high up on your list of high-quality encounters and it might be hard to track down a bar showing it live, but this all-Middle Eastern clash &#8211; a qualifier for the 2022 World Cup if you can believe it &#8211; will be worth keeping an eye on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The venue itself has already been changed with civil unrest in Iraq making Basra an unworkable location, and instead the two sides will meet in Amman, a Jordanian port city perhaps best known for its scuba diving. It would have been the first meeting between the two sides actually held in Iraq since 2001 &#8211; but alas anti-government protests put paid to that one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>On the footballing side, Iran have so much belief in their squad that they have left out Brighton&#8217;s Alireza Jahanbakhsh, although given his solitary appearance for his club side this year, picking him might have been folly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>They will not want for attacking threat though as Zenit St Petersburg&#8217;s Sardar Azmoun is fit, and he has 32 goals in 49 international appearances.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Attempting to stop him will be Ali Adnan, the former Udinese defender now based in Canada with the Vancouver Whitecaps; for him, this game will be about much more than football after he flew to Baghdad to join in the demonstrations against Prime Minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>iNews.co.uk &#8211; LONDON, The international break before Christmas is traditionally one that yawns wide open&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26307,"featured_media":37946,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[90,84,92,86,110],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-37945","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-c17-asian-competitions","category-c47-featured-news","category-c21-international-football-news","category-c13-team-melli-news","category-world-cup"],"views":1240,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37945","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=37945"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37945\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":37947,"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37945\/revisions\/37947"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/37946"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37945"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37945"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37945"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}