AFC U23 Championship : Qatar 2016

[Damavand]

Japanese coach is the hero of the night. It was his subs that turned the game around.

Is it any wonder that he totally out coached Khakpour ??

[persianfire]

If you want to be successful at continental competitions, you need to avoid Japan in the knockout stage. I remember they also eliminated us at the 2010 Asian Games. Khakpour..What an idiot. He should have never fielded reserves against Qatar.

[Paradigm]

I saw Iran-Japan match highlights and it looked like Iran missed a couple of 100% chances to put the game away in regular time.

[Nariman]

This once again just goes to show how much potential our team had....

Japan, the final champions, beat all its opponents during the tournament in regular time - only Iran not only managed to stay undefeated, but also was the superior team considering the couple of sitters we missed. Iran, a team that was led by an incompetent staff and additionally was missing 4 top players (Azmoun, Jahanbakhsh, Ezatollahi, Norhollahi), with 3 of them already being part of the senior team! Now go & imagine what we could have done with a full squad or at least with a decent coaching staff!

[Doctor DOOM]

^ but how can we say an incompetent staff while at the same time we say our team dominated the mighty japs?
If any of the FIVE surefire chances we got during the normal time had been converted, God knows where we'd be and what we all would be saying.

Yes, nobody denies the inexperience of Khakpour. But it's not as if Wenger and Guradiola were beating at the doors of IFF to coach our neglected Omid team, was it? His tactics for the regular time were pretty decent AND quite encouraging given the strength of the opposition. We just didn't allow for so many wastage of opportunities.

We did have some missteps in the group phase and the knockout stage. But we also showed promise, that if we truly invested in our youth and didn't treat them as untouchables and insignificant, we could reach pretty decent heights.


I really hope we don't ruin a promising coaching career as we've done on so man occasions.

[tmfan]

Did we have so many golden chances in the regular time? I watched the full game again and imo we had only two or three clear chances.

[Doctor DOOM]

Two shots for Motahari
One header for Mohammadi (hit post)
One header for Karimi
One more shot for another lad I forgot (hit post if I remember correctly)


Besides, if Akhbari had followed the ABC of goalkeeping and had come out for the in-swinger free kick of the first goal, who knows what would have happened. We certainly wouldn't have been forced to change our four man defense formation that had dominated the game to a three defender ultra attacking formation (coz in the knockout stage it doesn't matter if you lose by 1 or 5 goals. You're put anyway. So it was sound strategy to shift to attack, even desperate attacks).

Who knows if we could have either continued our strategy or even gone into the penalties, or .... .

[Tehranto]

Did we have so many golden chances in the regular time? I watched the full game again and imo we had only two or three clear chances.

That's a lot of chances.

[ferdowsi]

Japanese coach is the hero of the night. It was his subs that turned the game around.
Is it any wonder that he totally out coached Khakpour ??

Have you seen the poll on http://footballitarin.com? Looks like most the blame has gone toward the technical staff... and rightly so. I think Afshin Ghotbi would have been a much better choice, and he said he wanted to manage the U-23 side.

[Sarbaze-Vatan]

Have you seen the poll on http://footballitarin.com? Looks like most the blame has gone toward the technical staff... and rightly so. I think Afshin Ghotbi would have been a much better choice, and he said he wanted to manage the U-23 side.

No. Abdollah Veisi, Yahya Golmohammadi, Alireza Mansourian, and Mansour Ebrahim zadeh would have been better choices for u23 team.

[Sarbaze-Vatan]

Why Japan u23 and Korea u23 sides were able to have their European players for this tournament but we did not have any???????? I am surprise that no one discussed about this.

[Nokhodi]

Why Japan u23 and Korea u23 sides were able to have their European players for this tournament but we did not have any???????? I am surprise that no one discussed about this.

None of their legionnaires are starters or even constant subs.
Whereas JB, Azmoun and Ezatollahi are important players in their clubs.

[Nader25]

Why Japan u23 and Korea u23 sides were able to have their European players for this tournament but we did not have any???????? I am surprise that no one discussed about this.

bcause of shataries Conspiracy of course, not hard to guees. I tought about it.....mage namdooni fedration football iran is driven by a handful of bozghaleye bi orze.
Bt the way, i dont Think there was a team within this tournement which clearly and dominantly deserved to get Champion including japan.

[GoIran]

None of their legionnaires are starters or even constant subs.
Whereas JB, Azmoun and Ezatollahi are important players in their clubs.

That's not true. As for the Japanese legionnaires, the Austrian based player has scored 10 goals for club this season. The Swiss based player is a starter too. Maybe the Japanese FA tried harder than useless IFF.

[Team Melli Fan]

Queue all the arabs supporting Iraq in the Olympics now. No sense of national pride.