Post-Game --- IRAN - SOUTH KOREA (friendly?!?!?!!)

[Amoo]

It is nice to see TM playing organized and as a unity. But after 3 1/2 years having CQ as our head coach its about time to see some more variety and improvement in our tactical game. Anyway feels good to beat kareh 3 times in a row.

[ramingeles2000]

you are too critical of him man
I can assure you without CQ there would be no dejagah & gucci
and also rahmati would be your goalie with his shitty pussy boy attitude
now we can see Haghighi is a beast and CQ had alot of faith in pooladi montazeri sadeghi hajisafi.. where were these guys before?
CQ is 100x better then any Iranian coach.. now you want to go get guardiola to bring attacking football to Iran? please be my guest, unless we get better then CQ he is the best and he knows more then me & you so trust his decisions.. he has been right every time

don't waste your breath. Dr Doom will criticize - and has criticized - every and all TM coaches.

Look at results objectively. The objective truth is that (1) we currently have a talent drought and (2) we are performing either AT or even arguably ABOVE our historic level. Bringing these 2 truths together, we see that CQ is doing an excellent job.

End of story.

[Keano]

No, we did not play very defensive against Qatar and Lebanon. You can take issues with the way we attacked, but to say we played defensive is simply not true. Even your guy Khalatbari started in both home and away games against Lebanon.

Agreed!

To say we played defensively against Lebanon in particular, is an unfair and totally biased statement, for our dear DD has been the most notorious in that area, for as long as I have known him (Over a decade)

We had at least 10-15 scoring chances that day and had it not been to their keeper's superb goal keeping day and their luck factor, we should have won that match by 4-5 goal difference...

[Ando Teymourian]

Did not watch the game live, but I read the comments on the game day thread.

All I can say to people who have not seen the game yet, is watch it for yourself. Do not base judgements on what you read here. Because it is 90% emotional guys who can't tolerate a 90 min game.

My god, when I read the comments I thought to myself... "Oh god, what did Shojaei do?? WTF is going on???"..... Then I happened to watch the game, and realised the answer to my question was NOTHING. For the love of god, people made it seem like he lost the ball every touch. He had 2 bad plays, and 2 nice ones. Thats pretty much it. Not spectacular, but certain members (we all know who) were shitting bricks. It just shows that when there is "jav" to pick on one player, certain prone members pick up on it and regurgitate what they hear. If people were fair, and not focusing on one player, they would see that several players had more turnovers than Shojaei.


As for Haghighi "saving us".... I didn't know it was against the rules to have a good goalie. Also, he made 3 (very nice) saves. I don't think it is too much to ask of your keeper to make 3 saves during the course of the game.

Ghafouri was a nice addition the the RB. Its nice that he is speedy in addition to strong/bulky (kind of like Gholamreza) as opposed to someone like Fakhredinni who has the speed but is sort of lightweight (not that its bad).


Overall, this was not attractive football, but it was focused, disciplined, planned football. We played with our heads. Watch the press whenever Korea came into our half. 4 players on the top line (Gucci, Masoud, Hajsafi, Ando). It may not be attacking, but it is an aggressive press that closes down Korean time and space and makes them resort to longer balls (which Hosseini, Sadeghi, Montazeri, can usually win or at least make trouble for the forward).

The only thing that I wish is that the one touch passing is a little more accurate.... I can't count how many times a counter is ruined because someone's one touch pass is too high or too bouncy or too hard etc.... If we can polish that part of the game....our attacks will be much better.

[Doctor DOOM]

^ on how hard or quick the passes are, I can't say we must pass less aggressively. The better thing is we must control those passes better. In fact if we master quick and hard passing and by default controlling those passes, this gives the opposite team less time to mark or press us.
I'd love to see our lads exchange hard and quick passes. Generally a more pace football. To me that's a sign of great control and top class football.

[Cataphract]

Counter-attacking is not the same strategy as parking the bus. If you want examples of the latter watch our game against Korea in AC 2011 where we fielded 3 DMs, defended for dear life and didn't manage to create a single chance for 120 minutes.

Parking the bus means throwing every man behind the ball with little strategy other than hoping the ball just bounces off somebody and goes out, and when in possession just sending aimless long balls away from your own goal to alleviate pressure. God knows we've done enough of that before.

CQ's strategy is based on organized, methodical defending coupled with pressure to regain possession, then attacking with short quick vertical passes to catch your opponent off-guard as they try to transition to a defensive posture. This is not all-out defense and it does create chances. In fact with this exact tactic we created more opportunities against Argentina than even Germany managed to. The problem here is some of us think anything other than all-out attack is 'parking the bus'.

Totally agree!

The danish commentators and football experts kept mentioning how impressed they were by the lightening fast counterattacking and transitional play of Iran vs Argentina.

[Essi]

Dejagah & Stielike, his former German youth coach:

Is this before of after the game

[shahramii]

stop complaining iran kheyli manteghi va bahosh bazi kard. they knew exactly when to attack and had plan for every minute of the game. why do you think cq brought in two more offensive players when it was 20 mintuer left of the game? when he sees that the team is irritated and start playing on emotions at certain positions then he bring in more attacking players on the postions that the koreans play with emotions and are irritared.

[DireStraits]

stop complaining iran kheyli manteghi va bahosh bazi kard. they knew exactly when to attack and had plan for every minute of the game. why do you think cq brought in two more offensive players when it was 20 mintuer left of the game? when he sees that the team is irritated and start playing on emotions at certain positions then he bring in more attacking players on the postions that the koreans play with emotions and are irritared.

Greate observation. He understand the phsycological state of the game. That is why Koreans are pissed off. That is also why Dejagah played with their nerves. It is true that Koreans played most with the ball but Iran had more chances to score.
In Asian games Iran is grouped with 3 Arabic team and Arabs often Work togather to eleminate Iran. This makes CQ more appropriate coach than Bladzevic or his likes.

[MR.S]

[Bi-honar]

I can't believe you guys went on for 3 pages arguing whether or not we "parked the bus" like there's a universal definition for that! Baba, it's a subjective term, we parked the bus, we played defensively, tomato, to-ma-to, let's call the whole thing off!

The point is that we did not play attacking football yesterday and it has become VERY rare for us to see that from TM. I'm personally okay with a nice organized counter-attacking game against stronger opponents (like Argentina), but I've seen too much reliance and emphasis on this game plan and I don't think we needed to play like that against Korea particularly in a friendly game where we should be honing all our strenghts.

Having said that, I have to admit that CQ's formation yesterday was a counter-attacking one, rather than a defensive or park-the-bus one - at least on paper. Whether it was successfully implemented is another discussion, but this was not our usual 4-2-3-1 with our left/right D and DM's being unadventurous and seeing him experiment a bit was refreshing.

We went in to the game with a 4-1-4-1 as someone correctly pointed out earlier with Ando having been given more of a free role on attack (as an attacking midfielder). He also used two fast (i.e. speedy) wing backs who were clearly told they could move up (although Heydari did this a lot more thn Hajsafi). We obviously need some work on this system and to tweak the line-up because at times it left our defense disorganized and short handed, but it has the potential to be a very offensive formation on transitions IMHO.

Also don't forget that both Nekou and Ando, or at least one of them, will be retiring from TM after the Asian Cup and it will be difficult if not impossible to find two experienced DM's to replace them. Switching to the 4-1-4-1 will take some pressure off of that task.

Personally, I think Montazeri and Pouladi are the right people for our WB's and Hajsafi should be replacing Ashkan on the left side and, Ashkan should replace Shojaei and JB should play where he normally does to make that system work, because both JB and Haj are very young, energetic and talented and they can help take pressure off D if and when needed. I also think the free role should be given to Nekou rather than Ando and rather than making diagonal runs (as Ando was doing), he should be moving back and forth in a straight line to take shots on opponent's net.

But overall, I can see this being a very effective system when the boys settle into their positions, particularly when Nekou retires, Ando can replace him there and Ashkan can fall back a bit, take over the play-maker role and we can easily introduce Azmoun or Rafei into the mix. I think Ashkan will be a much better player as a dedicated play-maker than the role he's playing now.

[saadat_abad]

I can't believe you guys went on for 3 pages arguing whether or not we "parked the bus" like there's a universal definition for that! Baba, it's a subjective term, we parked the bus, we played defensively, tomato, to-ma-to, let's call the whole thing off!

The point is that we did not play attacking football yesterday and it has become VERY rare for us to see that from TM. I'm personally okay with a nice organized counter-attacking game against stronger opponents (like Argentina), but I've seen too much reliance and emphasis on this game plan and I don't think we needed to play like that against Korea particularly in a friendly game where we should be honing all our strenghts.

Having said that, I have to admit that CQ's formation yesterday was a counter-attacking one, rather than a defensive or park-the-bus one - at least on paper. Whether it was successfully implemented is another discussion, but this was not our usual 4-2-3-1 with our left/right D and DM's being unadventurous and seeing him experiment a bit was refreshing.

We went in to the game with a 4-1-4-1 as someone correctly pointed out earlier with Ando having been given more of a free role on attack (as an attacking midfielder). He also used two fast (i.e. speedy) wing backs who were clearly told they could move up (although Heydari did this a lot more thn Hajsafi). We obviously need some work on this system and to tweak the line-up because at times it left our defense disorganized and short handed, but it has the potential to be a very offensive formation on transitions IMHO.

Also don't forget that both Nekou and Ando, or at least one of them, will be retiring from TM after the Asian Cup and it will be difficult if not impossible to find two experienced DM's to replace them. Switching to the 4-1-4-1 will take some pressure off of that task.

Personally, I think Montazeri and Pouladi are the right people for our WB's and Hajsafi should be replacing Ashkan on the left side and, Ashkan should replace Shojaei and JB should play where he normally does to make that system work, because both JB and Haj are very young, energetic and talented and they can help take pressure off D if and when needed. I also think the free role should be given to Nekou rather than Ando and rather than making diagonal runs (as Ando was doing), he should be moving back and forth in a straight line to take shots on opponent's net. But overall, I can see this being a very effective system when the boys settle into their positions.

Spot on! Great post aziz. Really enjoyed reading it

[TM homeboy]

We don't play defensive we just have a hard time holding possession

CQ's strategy seems like he likes to park the bus, but its clear that his strategy is when we have possession attack with the whole team and when they have possession defend with the whole team.
Which is a good strategy, but when our players lack the ability to make quick passes and keep possession they end up defending the whole time.
Our main problem that separate us from the good teams around the world is that we can keep possession with accurate passes under pressure.
Hence possession is always given to superior teams and we have to play in our defensive phase.
All the best team defend as a team and attack as a team.

[TM homeboy]

^ on how hard or quick the passes are, I can't say we must pass less aggressively. The better thing is we must control those passes better. In fact if we master quick and hard passing and by default controlling those passes, this gives the opposite team less time to mark or press us.
I'd love to see our lads exchange hard and quick passes. Generally a more pace football. To me that's a sign of great control and top class football.

you have to relate this point to your assessment on why we play defensive the whole time.
Its because we can't keep possession with our lack of ball control and passing abilities under pressure. hence we're always in a defensive phase of CQ strategy.
this goes back to domestic IPL and youth program short comings. Also not enough friendlies to get the players in sync with each other.

[EKBATAN]

Yeah i posted it on reddit, didnt think so many people would be interested lol. It made it to the front page... Its a good read.

you're the OP on that thread ? haha