The team has one more warm-up friendly to play Sunday as it prepares for its first preliminary games of the 2014 World Cup later this month. It is playing all the friendlies in Austria, where it has gone to prepare for the World Cup prelims.
In its first game under Queiroz, the national team played Metalist Kharkiv, a Ukrainian professional club, to a scoreless tie earlier this month. Queiroz fielded two entirely different teams for each half, as he clearly wanted to get a view of as many players in action as possible.
A few days later, the national team beat Slovakia’s national team 2-0 with goals by Hadi Nowruzi and Saeed Daqiqi. That was an impressive showing given that Iran sank to 50th in the world in the last month’s FIFA rankings while Slovakia was ranked 28th.
Next Iran played a Czech club, FC Banik Ostrava. Iran had to come from behind to beat the Czechs 3-2 with goals by Nowruzi again plus Mohammad Qazi and Pejman Montazeri.
Iran will play the Madagascar national team July 17. That team ranks 138th in the world.
After that comes the matches that matter. In its first preliminaries of the 2014 World Cup, Iran faces the Maldive Islands in home and away matches July 23 and 28. Iran once set an international record for goals scored in defeating the Maldives 17-0. But that was more than a decade ago and the Maldives have been trying to improve themselves. The Maldives ranked below 200 in the 1990s. They are now ranked 151st.
