{"id":39411,"date":"2020-06-07T17:14:08","date_gmt":"2020-06-08T00:14:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/?p=39411"},"modified":"2020-06-07T17:14:08","modified_gmt":"2020-06-08T00:14:08","slug":"back-to-the-beginning-with-alireza","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/2020\/06\/07\/back-to-the-beginning-with-alireza\/","title":{"rendered":"Back to the beginning with Alireza!"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Brighton&HoveAlbion.com – BRIGHTON, Albion midfielder talks us through his early days as a footballer.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Like all budding footballers, Alireza Jahanbakhsh had an idol he looked up to.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here he talks us through the early days of his career that remarkably included sharing the same pitch with an Iran international he\u2019d admired from a young age.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Who was your first footballing hero?<\/em><\/strong> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The most important games that I remember were the qualification matches for Iran to get into the 1998 World Cup in France. I was five or six years old and remember watching to see how they did.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Iran did well in the qualification and people were really excited about the games. My family are big football fans and we all watched them. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

That generation has been one of the best ever that played for the country. We had a player called Mehdi Mahdavikia who was always my idol. He played in Germany for 12 years. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I was a bit older\u00a0I remember the 2002 World Cup, the Brazilian Ronaldo was my biggest idol then. I was now playing football myself with my friends and I was always trying to act like him.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What was your first football shirt?<\/em><\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Before football I played a lot of different sports! At six or seven I did gymnastics for two years and I loved it at the time. That was when I wore my first proper sporting outfit. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then at the age of nine or 10 I went to a class for self defence, and from the age of 11 I started to play sports with a ball. I played handball, indoor football and lots more sports. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

My first jersey was for my school. I remember they gave us a full outfit with top, shorts and trainers. I loved it at the time, and it was a great feeling when I wore it.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

At what age did football become your main focus?<\/em><\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I was very close to playing indoor football after I had been selected for the national team. There was a tournament for under-15s that I was invited to when I was only 12. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I was the top scorer during the year and really enjoyed it. I made the national team and from age 13 moved to an academy in my home town. I played there for a year and then went to try out for the under-15 national side. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I didn\u2019t get selected, so my football started then really. I played in the third division back home and the moved to Tehran to a small club for a year and progressed to the first team and the first division of the\u00a0Iranian League.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You made your Iranian Pro League debut at the age of 17 for Damish Gilan, becoming one of their youngest ever players \u2013 what was that like?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was amazing to be honest. I was young and wanted to get as many minutes as possible in the first division.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I wanted to learn and progress. Funnily enough the year I broke into the side, the player I mentioned earlier whom I looked up to, Mehdi Mahdavikia, was returning from Germany! He played in right midfield and I played right-back in my first game. I couldn\u2019t believe it. It really was a dream come true for me to play against one of my first heroes. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I played there for another season and enjoyed a really good campaign, and then I moved on to Holland in 2013.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Brighton&HoveAlbion.com – BRIGHTON, Albion midfielder talks us through his early days as a footballer. Like…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26307,"featured_media":39412,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[84,89,93],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-39411","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-c47-featured-news","category-c16-iranian-legionairs","category-c22-players-spotlight"],"views":1647,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39411","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=39411"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39411\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":39413,"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39411\/revisions\/39413"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/39412"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39411"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39411"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39411"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}