It is all over for Team Melli at the World Cup. Iran exited in a disappointing, heart breaking and less than exciting manner. A deserved goal-less draw and a last minute defeat temporarily made us believe and have faith but then the reality hit everyone quite hard in the last match. Emotions aside, Team Melli got what it deserved nothing more nothing less. If it had made the next round ahead of Bosnia or Nigeria , it would have been an injustice to football in general but most importantly it would have falsely covered the derisory state of the football in Iran .
The teams that made the World Cup finals have worked hard, planned well, played number of competitive practice matches and their federations wasted no resources in trying to support their teams to reflect their nations’ pride. In contrast Team Melli was an ill-prepared team , run by a federation that had comical and acute lack of resources , trained by a coach who had little confidence in his players, and a coach who was not versatile enough to change tactics when it was most required. Expecting success under these circumstances is pretty much a wishful thinking.
Despite all that, we have to respect the performance of our players who all gave more than 100%. No one can deny the fact that they tried hard and simply went out of steam. Again, with the training regime of Queiroz who spent the majority of the valuable training camps physically pushing his players to the limit , it would have been a matter of time before they would collapse at some stage. Unfortunately, it was the last match and the one that mattered most where Team Melli players came short. Fatigue was killing them, two weeks in South Africa and another in Austria , with very little rest , they flew to Brazil early for another couple of weeks of tough physical training to prepare for the World Cup.
In essence, Queiroz was trying to build a top physical shape team in a couple of month while such task requires a whole season of regular regimented training with ample rest periods for recovery to build a strong team. The work of a whole season cannot be done in a couple of months only. Bad practices of players also cannot be undone in such a short period.
Could Queiroz have done much better than this ? or maybe that is his ceiling of his capabilities and could not give any better than that. After the exit from the last World Cup 2010, Cristiano Ronaldo was asked to give a reason for Portugal exit, he pointed at Querioz, Portugal coach and told the reporter to ask him. What he really meant was that Querioz coaching and game plan failed the team. Looking back at the last few months of his work with Iran Team, CR7 may very well had a valid point.
Putting all the blame on the coach is quite unreasonable though, despite the common belief that coaches have to shoulder most of the blames for defeats. Queiroz and the FFIRI administration did not see eye to eye either and that had negative effect on his work. The Portuguese ruffled a few feathers in Iran by some of the publicity he created on issues such as the Official kit , Friendly matches , lack of resources and marginalizing of the domestic league. You can safely say that Queiroz does not have many friends in Tehran. His adversaries are aplenty and they come from all corners of football.
The Federation has never been financially strong or organized enough to meet Queiroz’s demands, be it tactical, monetary or logistic. Kaffashian and brazenly for that, never skips a chance for begging money from the government. There is hardly any talk of self-reliance and organizing the federation in a professional way to generate revenue. It is too much of a burden on Kaffashian and his generals, as he prefers the easy way and hand out. So, naturally if there is little money to spend , the expectations should also be limited.
The irony is that lessons learned from previous failures have hardly been heeded in Iran’s football. The chances are that the status quo will prevail and with it the heart break of one of the finest sets of fans in the world, Team Melli fans.