With each of the four teams in Iran’s Asian Cup group having played their first games Tuesday, Iran stood unrivaled at the top of the Group D standings.
Iran got there with a big boost from the Iraqi goalkeeper, who made a major mistake and allowed Iran to score.
The other two teams in the group, North Korea and the UAE, played to a scoreless tie. That gave Iran three points, North Korea and the UAE one each, and Iraq none.
The next games are Saturday, January 15, when Iran plays North Korea and Iraq plays the UAE. The final games of the group stage are next Wednesday when Iran plays the UAE and Iraq plays North Korea. The top two teams in each of the four groups advance. The Asian Cup is being played in Qatar.
In Tuesday’s game, Iran emerged a 2-1 winner over Iraq. But it didn’t look so good at the start. Iran conceded the opening goal against the run of play in the 12th minute.
Iraq skipper Younis Mah-moud, was credited with the score after ramming the ball home from right on the line after Emad Mohammed’s header back across the box appeared to be heading in anyway.
However, Iran leveled three minutes before halftime when Gholam-Reza Rezai beat the offside trap to collect Andranik Teymourian’s pass into the penalty area and beat goalkeeper Mahdi Rahmati for his ninth international goal.
The Iranians could not make their dominance count, however, until Iraqi goalkeeper Moham-mad Kassid’s mistake. Kassid completely misjudged a dipping free kick from out on the left by Imam Mobali, which bounced in front of him and appeared to go through his legs in the 84th minute.
Al-Rayyan Stadium was barely half-full for a match. The teams observed a brief period of silence before the kickoff in honor of the77 people who died in Iran in a plane crash Sunday.
“When these two teams play each other there’s so much rivalry and history, so it’s very difficult to get the players to concentrate and focus on football and it becomes a fighting game,” Iran coach Afshin Ghotbi was quoted as saying by Agence France Presse.
But despite the 1980-88 war, which outsiders erroneously think dominates the players, the game was relatively low-key and polite affair. The sole yellow card issued by Uzbekistan referee Ravshan Irmatov went to Iraq substitute Samer Saeed. But it was that yellow card that led to the free kick that gave Iran its winning goal.