June 25, 2021
With four back-to-back victories over 10 days, Team Melli Iran’s national soccer team surged from third place to first place in its group, advancing in its quest to nail down a position in the 2022 World Cup finals.
Team Melli scored 17 goals in the four matches while giving up only one. Sardar Azmoun, who plays professionally in Russia, was the star of the series, scoring three of Iran’s goals in the final four games.
The Asian elimination round involved 40 teams divided into eight groups of five, playing home and away matches for a total of eight games each. The first half of the series saw Iran win two matches, but then lose the next two, dumping Iran into third place and appearing to doom its chances of making the finals, to be played next year in Qatar.
Then the coronavirus struck and all play was suspended for all of 2020. The Asian Football Confederation then decided to scrap the home-and-away format and instead scheduled all the remaining matches to be played over a two-week period in June.
Iran’s first four matches in 2019 were played with Marc Wilmots as coach. But he grew disgusted with the Iranian Football Federation and left Iran. He was replaced by Dragan Skocic (pronounced sko-chich), a Croatian national who had coached club teams in Iran for almost a decade and thus didn’t need an introduction to the available players.
But between the epidemic and the Islamic Republic’s poor image, he was able to schedule only three friendly matches to test his players. (He won all three.) Few were predicting good fortune for Team Melli. But Skocic proved the doubters wrong.
Here are the scores for all eight matches in the elimination round, the first four played in 2019:
Sep 10 Iran 2 Hong Kong 0
Oct 10 Iran 14 Cambodia 0
Oct 15 Bahrain 1 Iran 0
Nov 14 Iraq 2 Iran 1
Jun 3 Iran 3 Hong Kong 1
Jun 7 Iran 3 Bahrain 0
Jun 11 Iran 10 Cambodia 0
Jun 15 Iran 1 Iraq 0
The win in the last game over Iraq was crucial for Iran. It moved Team Melli from second place in the group to first. In 25 games between Iran and Iraq over the years, Iran has now won 13 to six for Iraq and six draws. The sole goal in the latest match was by Azmoun in the 35th minute.
Four days earlier, Iran padded its goal tally with a 10-1 win over Cambodia. What was most impressive was that nine Team Melli players scored in that match. The one player who scored twice was Kaveh Rezaei, who scored the eighth and 10th goals. And Sardar Azmoun did not score at all. Cambodia was the whipping boy of the round, failing to win a single match and giving up 44 goals while only scoring two.
Before that, Iran defeated Hong Kong 3-1, giving up the only goal it gave up in the June matches.
In the first of the June games, Azmoun scored twice as Iran defeated hosts Bahrain 3-0.
In an unusual development, Skocic publicly criticized his winning team after two of the games. He condemned the players after the Hong Kong game for slackening off after scoring three goals and allowing Hong Kong to get one late game goal.
After the final win over Iraq, he said, “We played organized in the first half, but I am not satisfied with the way we played in the second half, when we had several goal-scoring chances. After we scored the goal, the team lost the control of the match and it made me angry.”
This was the second round of Asian elimination games. The top teams in the eight groups and the four best second-placed teams now move on to the third and final round, where they will be split into two groups and play 10 home-and-away matches. The teams coming in first and second in the two groups will go to Qatar next December for the finals.
The teams in the final elimination round with Iran are: Japan; Australia (the two teams that won all their matches in the just-completed round); Syria; Saudi Arabia; UAE; South Korea; China; Oman; Iraq; Vietnam; and Lebanon.