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Iran’s Fresh Start

As Team Meli prepares to participate in the Qatar tournament, at the national level, Iran’s football begins a new era. Gone are the golden generation of Iran’s football that provided such players such as Abedzadeh, Daei, Bagheri, Azizi, Mahdavi Kia, Hashemian, Rezai and Ali Karimi. Position by position, Afshin Ghotbi has to try out and match talents for the starting line-up that have been waiting for years for veterans to retire to take their positions.
With the exception of Rahmati at the goalkeeper position and Nekunam in midfield, future stars and young guns would need to battle and earn the starting positions. Ghotbi therefore is finding himself in a peculiar position of trying to build a new national team for the 2011 Asian Cup while showing enough progress in the style of the game and results to keep the positive momentum going forward.

Interestingly, the Qatar tournament is a place to try-out, to learn and hopefully impress. For many years coaches, media and fans have been complaining about lack of friendly matches for the national team. This tournament provides a venue for three matches against teams with Iran’s strength level. Ironically, critics that have been complaining of lack of friendly matches are now complaining of such games.

Over the past eight and half years and since the unsuccessful 2001 world cup campaign when Blazevic led the Iran’s national team, Team Meli has seen nine head coaches (eight persons as Ivankovic coached the team twice). Every one of these coaches saw tremendous pressure from Iranian football community to perform and witnessed campaigns after campaigns by different elements for them to get fired. The unfortunate trend has been that coaches are judged by scores one match at a time. Most have not had time to plan and build their teams and were afraid how a single loss would end their tenure. Ghotbi like others has faced the same challenges and had his loss against Jordan last month.

As Ghotbi prepares his team for the Qatar Tournament, he has a chance to start with the fresh team and a three-game tournament to explore, discover and show progress. Ghotbi will not have Nekunam and Shojai with the team yet he has many youngsters to work with. He is trusted to build the Team Meli for the Asia Cup. What he needs to show with Iran’s performance is progress. Progress in style of play against worthy opponents like North Korea, Mali and Qatar would go a long way to provide Ghotbi with time to build his team for 2011. As the ninth head coach of Iran in the past nine years, Ghotbi has a chance to break the string of short term coaches in Iran. Ghotbi however has to show his mark on the team with performance on the field. At this stage and this tournament, the “mark” doesn’t have to be the final scores. Team’s play, aggressiveness and style would be what fans and critics alike will look for.