{"id":54453,"date":"2026-01-31T19:00:08","date_gmt":"2026-02-01T03:00:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/?p=54453"},"modified":"2026-01-31T20:05:07","modified_gmt":"2026-02-01T04:05:07","slug":"afc-futsal-asian-cup-indonesia-2026-group-d-top-spot-matters-for-afghanistan-ir-iran","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/2026\/01\/31\/afc-futsal-asian-cup-indonesia-2026-group-d-top-spot-matters-for-afghanistan-ir-iran\/","title":{"rendered":"AFC Futsal Asian Cup Indonesia 2026: Group D top spot matters for Afghanistan, Iran"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>AFC &#8211; JAKARTA, <strong>It will be a battle for the purists when Afghanistan take on Iran in the AFC Futsal Asian Cup Indonesia 2026 Group D decider on Sunday.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Both have been flawless thus far, qualifying for the quarter-finals with a match to spare but something will have to give in Sunday\u2019s highly-anticipated encounter.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt was unbelievable for us to achieve a big 7-0 victory,\u201d said Mortezaei. \u201cThe fans made the atmosphere for us like we were playing at home.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe are happy to reach the next stage and this is what we deserved. Playing against Iran is always difficult but we will try to maintain our high level.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe drew with them in the last game (2-2 in the 2025 Islamic Solidarity Games) but here, we want to finish first in the group and, hopefully, to be able to keep a clean sheet going as well.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Iran\u2019s place in the knockout stage was sealed after they overcame a stubborn Saudi Arabia 2-0 on Friday with second half strikes from Amirhossein Gholami and Bagher Mohammadi.<\/p>\n<p>The 13-time champions have an impeccable record of winning every group stage match since the format was introduced in the 2007 edition and head coach Vahid Shamsaee intends to add one more to the collection.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe are happy to win and are already thinking about the next game,\u201d said Shamsaee. \u201cOn the performance, there\u2019s still a lot of things we can do better and we will try to achieve that in the next game.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>AFC &#8211; JAKARTA, It will be a battle for the purists when Afghanistan take on&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26307,"featured_media":54454,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[175,84,88,86],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-54453","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-asian-cup","category-c47-featured-news","category-c15-futsal","category-c13-team-melli-news"],"views":914,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54453","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=54453"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54453\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":54456,"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54453\/revisions\/54456"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/54454"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=54453"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=54453"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=54453"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}