All Praise Due to Mobali

Iman Mobali is a player I truly adore, because simply among all Iranian players he is the one with the most footballing intelligence. The only Iranian player who would be of Cruyff's taste is him. I would have written a total praise for Mobali, but I had to keep it this way. Nonetheless, Mobali rules.
Article on ISP

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Nekounam and his Partner in Crime
IranSportsPress.com - The game against China was apart of all the intense action a very interesting one in terms of tactics and how the performance of one player can change the game of a whole team.
Mahdi Rahimi

The two halfves against China were completely opposite in terms of performance. While in the first half Iran didn't really know what was going on and they were blitzed by China, in the second half China didn't have anything to say and Iran controlled the game with relative ease. If Iran's first half performance had been half as good as the one in the second half, they would have won the game relatively easy. Unfortunately, it wasn't enough for 3 points, but coming back from being 2-0 down and drawing 2-2 still tastes good. But what was the reason? Simply said, the reason was Nekounam.
The point is not that Nekounam played bad in the first half and good in the second half. The point is more, that Nekounam had no one to play with in the first half, but had a partner in crime in the second half.
Nekounam has always been a player who preferred possesion over simply playing forward. There's a huge difference there we have to understand first. When you play forward, you simply play forward, you release the ball quickly, you try to give the game speed etc. When you play on possesion, you try to control the ball and have the ball in your team for most of the time. It doesn't matter for you whether you play forward, backward, north, south, east, west, slow, fast...you just try to have the ball and keep it away from the opponent. It even makes sense. When you have possesion, the opponent doesn't and hence it's difficult for him to score. This type of play has developed even further during his time in Spain, where the player in his position has to be able to control the ball and control possesion. However, in the first half Nekounam was left alone with his plan. No one else really seemed to care about possesion. The other player in Iran's team who would have cared too about possesion was Zandi, but Zandi, specially in the beginning had too much to do with defensive work on his side and couldn't help Javad.
In the second half the key to Javad's Man of the Match peformance came in, it was Iman Mobali. Mobali doesn't play in Spain, but he has the footballing brain of a La Liga player. Mobali, like Javad, doesn't care about going forward. He cares about possesion and space and he tries to use that space. Iman doesn't play the long pass forward, he plays the ball that makes sure his team remains in possesion or at least even if they lose possesion have enough time to regroup and win the ball back. Javad finally had a player apart of Zandi who understood his football, and Iran had possesion, had chances, and outplayed China in what was one of the best performances of our team in a long time. And Nekounam wasn't Nekounam anymore, he was NekouMAN, a Superhero as a 6, becuse he finally had his Robin, his Sundance Kid, his Starsky, his partner in crime.

Iman replacing Karimi, who had a shocker of a game, and giving our game a whole new dimension by keeping possesion, slow build up and excellent passing, made us control China for 45 minutes, and we could have scored a 3rd one too, while after the first 30 minutes, we could have been 3-0 behind.

I don't want to give too much credit to the coaching staff today because they did too many things wrong, and they did so many things wrong, that it's not even funny, but credit again to them for making the right sub and replacing Karimi with Mobali, which was a huge move.

I had mentioned before, that it's important to learn from mistakes. The coaching staff hadn't unfortunately learned that it's a mistake to play Enayati on the left wing as he is hugely ineffective on that position. It remains to be seen whether they will learn in the next games or not. As far as the leftback position is concerned, despite everything Zandi simply doesn't seem to be the solution. I prefer Zandi over Madanchi as a leftback, simply because Zandi is an incredibly intelligent player, but it might just be best to play Nosrati, Aghili or even Rezaei there and push Zandi forward. That way we might not have to stay through another early scare in the quarterfinals, as Zandi as a leftback against either Saudi Arabia or Korea would be complete suicide and a waste of such a brilliant player.
If we learn from the mistakes, we might go somewhere. If not, we shouldn't make it further than quarterfinals.

You can watch the goals of the game here