Mehdi Taremi @ FC Porto | 2020-2021

[mattigil]

......

Not too sure if this is the official Liga NOS team of the season, it seems to be whoscored's team of the season. No team of the season has been announced yet by the league anywhere it seems

[inarsenewetrust]

Mehdi Taremi's Dreams
One of the most distinctive strikers in Europe.

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In the Islamic tradition, dreams play an important role. In the various collections of stories of the prophets it is not uncommon to come across revelations that occurred during a dream, as in the case of Abraham, and in various hadiths (sayings attributed to the prophet Muhammad) situations occur in which the Prophet asked his companions to tell him their dreams, with the aim of deriving a teaching from them. Within the intimate circle of the first umma, that of the first disciples of Muhammad, of the "rashiduns" (the well guiding ones) and of his cousin, half-brother and son-in-law Ali Ibn Abi Talib, the latter - a fundamental figure of what most forward will be "Shiism" - he will become particularly expert in dream interpretation.




Dreams are all part of the "world of the occult" (al alam al akhira) but they are not all the same: in particular in the Twelver Shiite tradition, a dream to be considered the bearer of a real message must be completely intelligible, clear. It must not leave room for ambiguity - even if typical of many dreams -, it must in a nutshell be a "truthful dream" ( al ru'ya al sadiqa ), which does not need explanations, which on awakening still appears linear. If a dream is opaque, nuanced, ambiguous, it is very likely that it is the work of Shaytan (Satan) or one's own ego, driven by passions, beliefs and prejudices. It may be a dream of coursenegative, like those in which Imam Ja'far Sadiq - sixth imam of the twelfth - appeared severe, with the intent of frightening a believer in sleep, so that he would stop sinning while awake; and it can be a premonitory dream of a positive, auspicious nature.



Mehdi Taremi, a 29-year-old Iranian Porto striker, is a Shiite Muslim like most of his countrymen. In an interview with a broadcaster in his country, a few days after Porto-Juventus, he revealed that the night before the match with the bianconeri (won 2-1 by Porto) he had a dream in which he scored a goal in the early stages of the match . This dream "made me laugh while I was sleeping," Taremi said.



In Porto-Juventus, Taremi is fielded by Conceicao as a starter for the first time in the 2020-2021 Champions League. After sixty-three seconds of play, he senses that Bentancurt in his area is about to unload a sloppy ball at Szcesny. Uruguayan does not care to turn his gaze of those ten degrees that would have allowed him to see the Iranian attacker lurking behind him, ready to sneak into his field of vision when the interception is now inevitable. Before Bentancurt kicks, Taremi sprints and tackles the ball - in the meantime he has arrived lazily between Szcesny's feet - and with a rebound puts his team ahead.



It is a goal that perhaps reminds Taremi of laughter in his sleep - "I thanked God for making what I had dreamed of happen, then and then I couldn't even answer my teammates", he concludes in the interview -, a goal that contains stubbornness and cunning. And that evokes the idea of “o bichinho”, the insect , nickname given to him by the staff doctor of Carlos Queiroz, former coach of the Iranian national team. The Iranian's goal in Oporto against Juve will be decisive for the passage of the round matured in the return leg, in a 3-2 for the bianconeri in which Taremi will earn a penalty with surprising skill - which will be returned to later - but it will be done also eject in the 54th minute, only to explodeat the end of the match in a cry full of ambivalent sensations, of emotional tension. It wasn't the first time Taremi had cried in her career.



In the last two months of the Champions League, the first of Taremi as a starter, he scored a "dirty" and decisive goal against Juventus and a spectacular, overhead kick, at Stamford Bridge , which, however, will not be enough to pass the round. It was the first goal of an Iranian in the knockout stages of the Champions League but not the only reverse goal scored by an Iranian at Chelsea: Alireza Jahanbaksh of Brighton had also succeeded a year ago . In the midst of these two months, as well as in the midst of Taremi's intense career, there are several moments in which he has shown that he has particular qualities.





Taremi was born in 1992 and his physique certainly does not refer to that of an insect. Taremi is heavy, powerful, angular and agile at the same time: it seems to carry tens of kilos of scrap metal and lead, covered however by a rubber membrane that seems to facilitate its movements, to cushion friction. There are times when it seems cumbersome to the point of seeming bigger than it is, also thanks to a somewhat rudimentary technique; others in which its explosiveness and the painstaking ability to find the right spaces seem to reduce its dimensions and increase its agility. A bit like the Porto di Conceicao, it is able to generate different impressions depending on the game, the tactical context and the requests of the manager. A lot of work is required from the attackers without the ball. Marega and Taremi undertake the first pressing with an almost military application; with the ball, the support ones as well as the depth supply: they know how to pass entire games playing with their backs to the goal, acting as triggers for the insertion of the midfielders but also obsessively seeking depth with cuts in the middle of the center, or the widening of the line opponent with internal-external cuts.



It is the position of the Iranian, rather than Marega, that sometimes makes Porto slide from 433 to 4-4-2, when he moves to the right on the midfield line. Paradoxically, it does not excel in the use of the body, which makes it lose many duels (it wins 48%) in relation to the tonnage it has, but this defect somehow contributes to producing, as a side effect, its particular quality, certified by the numbers.



Mehdi Taremi loves contact with defenders, especially if he can "feel" them behind him, if he can go to occupy those 40 centimeters that separate the opponent from the ball with a visible sense of urgency. He loves it in the sense that he searches for it, prefers it to many other gestures, almost chases it. The indirect goal is to get fouled, possibly in dangerous areas. Maybe in the area. This was already seen in 2015, when he earned this penalty in the ranks of Persepolis in the Asian Champions League, then transforming it with a spoon.







However, if Taremi, after having dominated in Iran and Qatar, was known above all for his coldness in kicking them, the penalties, after accepting the offer of Rio Ave in Portugal (refusing a salary five times higher in the Arabian Peninsula) presents himself first with a hat-trick on his debut against Deportivo Aves; then, seven days later, at Josè Alvalade in Lisbon, he had three penalty foulsby Sebastian Coates, Sporting defender with a fair amount of international experience, who finds him really everywhere, just like a mosquito in August. It will end 2-3 for Rio Ave and Taremi will no longer leave the title. It must be said - but perhaps this further enhances his shrewdness, considering that we are talking about a player in the first week of European football - that the second earns it perhaps by simulating, almost creating a contact, chasing a ball that had stopped towards his door and rather badly, but that passes too close to Coates to exempt him from throwing his calves near the foot of the former Liverpool, clearly on purpose, as if he thinks about that every time he is in the area.



In the three penalties that Taremi earns against Sporting there is nothing random and there is a lot of his already developed football intelligence, his combativeness and his intuition. There is a " refined" player , as Conceicao defined him, even if we are used to associating refinement with the touch of the ball, with more sparkling aspects of the game. At the end of the 2019/20 season, in addition to 18 goals in 30 appearances (which allow him to win the top scorer ranking in cohabitation with Pizzi of Benfica), Taremi will have eight penalties : as many as those granted to Sporting or Famalicao, and more than those awarded to any Portuguese team, excluding Benfica, Porto, Tondela and his Rio Ave. Some penalties earned by Taremi really seem to depend on a perverse taste for the joke on the defenders : look at this earned at the end of April against Famalicao.



At the end of the season, among the offers of Benfica, Sporting and Porto, he will choose the Dragoes, then managing to earn Conceicao's esteem day after day. Today - in a team that has less chance of attacking with space than Rio Ave - he scored 13 goals (out of 12.50 expected goals ) in Liga Nos, 7 assists, 0.9 key passes per game on average, as well as to the constant work of exhaustion that allows Porto to change skin during and between matches. "A permanent headache, a source of destabilization" , the journalist Nuno Dias enthusiastically wrote a year ago, and then indulged in the geopolitical metaphor, describing the Iranian as a "spy for spaces that the enemy leaves free", as a player who "tries to invade no-man's lands with constancy and meticulousness ".



If Taremi is able to believe the dreams he has, the way he worked on his qualities, preserving them, managing them and expanding them - an assistant from Queiroz says he met him at the end of a workout, after which Taremi spent several minutes to nag the Portuguese coach on how to make a cut between central and full-back -, without having a particular natural talent, he also suggests he is also a pragmatic, realistic player, who has always kept his feet on the ground. Emotional but able to dispose of his emotions and put them at the service of his competitiveness, as when after Porto-Juventus he refusedthe shirt of Cristiano Ronaldo - his idol in adolescence - autographed and delivered to him by his partner Pepe, because "I want the one of the return to Turin". That is the answer of those who are not there to make the groupie of their idol but strongly believe they can beat him.



It could not, perhaps, be otherwise for a player who made his debut in the Iranian top league at 23, in Europe at 27, and who "stopped" playing football twice: the first, at twenty, when he cannot find an Iranian team linked to the Armed Forces - with which many players fulfill the compulsory military service - and is forced to serve in a real garrison in the south of the country; the second when he is disqualified for four months following the failure to comply with a pre-contract signed with the Turks of Caykur Rizespor. But perhaps, most of all, the spirit that Taremi shows on the pitch is influenced by a huge sliding door that closed in front of the Mordovia Arena in Saransk, one evening in late June.



It happens on his left - a shot he would hardly miss today - the ball that in the 94th minute of Iran-Portugal, on a score of 1-1, can guarantee Iran an incredible passage to the second round, within a prohibitive group with Spain , Morocco and Portugal. Taremi lets it slide to the left perhaps a fraction of a second too long, when the angle is too acute, and pulls from a few steps on the eternal net. That evening, in front of millions of Iranians in front of the TV, he could have become a real national hero, overtaking past players who also have a technical dimension superior to his. Not to become one, and in that way there, it is a burden that only players convinced of their qualities can bear, a burden that only a few know how to turn into the fuse that lights up a career.



Lorenzo Forlani, born in 1986, journalist, works for various newspapers, especially in the Islamic world. He also has a blog, OrienteRelativo. Cheer for Roma.

one of the most well written articles regarding any of our players that I have read. Huge credit and respect to the italian jounralist for his knowledge and research. Great read

https://www.ultimouomo.com/mehdi-tar...to-come-gioca/

[PEJ]

Great, now just dream you are going to drop a hat trick on Bahrain! Pretty please!

[PrinceAli]

Agha dream bigger. Dream you put the winner against Lloris in the final in Qatar 2022.

[Ardalan]

Nemidonam in gofte shode amma be nazar mirese Conceicao daare mire Napoli.

Gazzetta dello Sport minevise ke morrabbie Porto in chahaarshanbeh shayad bere Italia taa

gharaardaad raa emzaah kone.

Gazzetta dello Sport mamolan chert o pert neminevise.

Agar Conceicao bere omidvaram CQ beshe morrabbie Porto

https://www.gazzetta.it/Calcio/Calci...98736833.shtml

[Nokhodi]

Nemidonam in gofte shode amma be nazar mirese Conceicao daare mire Napoli.

Gazzetta dello Sport minevise ke morrabbie Porto in chahaarshanbeh shayad bere Italia taa

gharaardaad raa emzaah kone.

Gazzetta dello Sport mamolan chert o pert neminevise.

Agar Conceicao bere omidvaram CQ beshe morrabbie Porto

https://www.gazzetta.it/Calcio/Calci...98736833.shtml

SC o Napoli be ham mian. Kolan har do mesle atashfeshan hastan. Havadarha ham divooneh o asabi

[inarsenewetrust]

I find it pretty disingenuous when people say SC is not a good coach. Ok he benched taremi a couple times. But the results they got in CL were not simply "Beating a bad juve team" lol. They drew the best team in europe this season and only narrowly lost the other game against them away from home (Man city) in which they dominated the entire first half. Against the other finalist, chelsea, they pulled off 1 win and in the other game in no way deserved to lose, let alone 2-0. Only because of horrible individual mistakes from Zaidu and Tecatito did they drop that game. Keep in mind they were missing taremi and sergio, their best players.

This Porto team is, minus Taremi, Pepe, and Marchesin, full of players who at their very best can be described as decent. Mbemba was a bench player for newcastle now starting CB making good performances, Manafa should be nowhere near a CL pitch, much less Zaidu. Otavio, Corona, Diaz are extremely begir nagir and Marega was just good for physical pressure. Sergio was pretty much discounted by all of portugal including Porto and shipped of to PAOK for multiple years, now SC has made him a regular fixture in even portugal squad.

This incredible CL comes after selling all their best players in recent years with really no replacements : Pereira at leiciester, Danilo at PSG, Telles at United, Felipe starting CB at Atletico Madrid, Militao starting CB at Real Madrid, Fabio Silva at wolves. This was just past couple seasons, not even looking at the talent they lost before that.

Still, with basically what can be described as an average squad they never once looked out of place in CL, even latter rounds. The mark that SC did a great job is that a lot of people on this board hardly bat an eye at Quarterfinal achievement, nearly reaching Semis. In what world should this team be there in the first place...Let alone be going further?

IF they lose him to Napoli Id be very dissapointed. Hopefully they go for Nuno Espirito Santo from wolves or Carvalhal from braga (but I think he is happy there)

[inarsenewetrust]

on another note Mou, Conte, Conceicao in same league is gonna be absolute must watch TV.

[Ghermez Agha]

Nemidonam in gofte shode amma be nazar mirese Conceicao daare mire Napoli.

Gazzetta dello Sport minevise ke morrabbie Porto in chahaarshanbeh shayad bere Italia taa

gharaardaad raa emzaah kone.

Gazzetta dello Sport mamolan chert o pert neminevise.

Agar Conceicao bere omidvaram CQ beshe morrabbie Porto

https://www.gazzetta.it/Calcio/Calci...98736833.shtml

Now that would really be a dream come true. I have said it many times if CQ isn’t gonna be the TM coach, which we know he’s not, it would be incredible if he could coach a big European team. Porto would be amazing and I bet he would bring 1 or 2 more Iranians. He has some of his Colombian players there too.

[PrinceAli]

Are there any reports on who Porto is looking at for replacements?

[BacheLot]

Nemidonam in gofte shode amma be nazar mirese Conceicao daare mire Napoli.

Gazzetta dello Sport minevise ke morrabbie Porto in chahaarshanbeh shayad bere Italia taa

gharaardaad raa emzaah kone.

Gazzetta dello Sport mamolan chert o pert neminevise.

Agar Conceicao bere omidvaram CQ beshe morrabbie Porto

https://www.gazzetta.it/Calcio/Calci...98736833.shtml

Huh
Ye koskhole kalekharo mindaazan beeroon o yeki digaro miaran ..!?

Sc looks to be a good squad managing, team-building coach to me with about Avg tactical know how, but his sideline temperament is a disaster..!
I hope Porto can upgrade on that front upon departure..! Carvahal would be a relatively cheap significant upgrade IMO

[diz]

love how Mehdi’s dad is the strongest source for rumors for SC’s departure from Porto

[teammelli91]

^ The F.. Lol does Taremi’s dad work for Dragões TMZ?

[Roozbeh-G2006]

Huh
Ye koskhole kalekharo mindaazan beeroon o yeki digaro miaran ..!?

Sc looks to be a good squad managing, team-building coach to me with about Avg tactical know how, but his sideline temperament is a disaster..!
I hope Porto can upgrade on that front upon departure..! Carvahal would be a relatively cheap significant upgrade IMO

Napoli is a highly emotional club with extreme fans. This combination is going to be a tnt explosion during and after every match. I think they would love him there. lol

[Mahsaa]

Never liked Concaicao and i dont even think he is a good coach, Italy will kill him i guess