Iran’s U-23 (Omid Team) played against its Qatari counterpart on Thursday afternoon in the Luceil training grounds and lost 2-1.

The team under Hamid Estili has been having disappointing results of late in their preparations for the AFC Asian U23 championships in Thailand on January 2020

Qatar went ahead from the start of the match with Khaled Munir taking advantage of a real blunder in Iranian back four and scoring for Qatar. In the 8th minute, the Qatari forward Mohammed Wa’ad scored the second goal for his team with a good header.  Two goals in quick succession disturbed all of Estili’s plans.

To their credit, the Omid players did not crumble and with some fine work by Omid Noorafkan, and a powerful strike, the Sepahan midfielder scored to narrow the deficit for Iran.  Omid Team continued to press forward searching for the equalizer, but the Qatari defence and their goalkeeper gave the Iranians very little breathing space.

In the second half. Omid Team was more organized with a change in the line up that introduced  Hosseinzadeh, Ghaedi, Azadi and Sharifi coming in as substitutes in the second half. In the dying minute of the match, Mehdi Ghaedi skillfully dribbled past the Qatari goalkeeper leaving their last defender no option but to foul Ghaedi to prevent the equalizer

The defender Mohammed Al-Bakri, who committed the deliberate foul in a scoring opportunity was immediately given the red card, but the referee did not award a penalty as it was outside the box.

The game ended in a disappointing 2-1 loss for Omid. This defeat comes after the disappointing results of Omid Team in Jakarta playing friendly games against the Indonesian Olympics team. (a draw and a loss). Omid Team has not tasted victory for some time now.