Belarus to test Team Melli in Austria

Persianfootball.com – KAPFENBERG, With less than a month to go until Iran’s World Cup opener versus Nigeria, Iran kick off a final series of four friendly matches with a game against Belarus on Sunday.

The game will start at 14:00 local time in the Franz Fekete stadium in the currently very rainy town of Kapfenberg and is part of the Iranian training camp in Austria, which kicked off this week and will last until the end of May.

Belarus, like the next friendly opposition Montenegro (May 26), is supposed to serve as sparring partner to simulate Iran’s final World Cup group game versus Bosnia on June 25.

Iran’s previous test matches in 2014 – versus Guinea in March and against four South African club sides in April and May – as well as Iran’s final Austrian friendly against Angola on May 30 serve as preparation for the Nigeria match.

A final dress rehearsal against Trinidad & Tobago is set in Brazil on June 8 then.

Iranian lineup with question marks

After most players finally joined the training camp this week, only Masoud Shojaei will not yet have arrived by Sunday. The Las Palmas playmaker is supposed to join as 28th player on Monday.

His countrymates Ashkan Dejagah, Alireza Jahanbakhsh and Daniel Davari will arrive today and almost certainly will not be considered for the Belarus match as well. Also Foolad Khuzestan duo Sousha Makani and Bakhtiar Rahmani didn’t join before Saturday morning.

Unclear is if some of the many late arrivals of this week will be thrown in, or if Carlos Queiroz will rely on the players who had been with the team in the previous training camp in South Africa already. This could mean usual fixed starters Pejman Montazeri and skipper Javad Nekounam could be dropped from the lineup, among others.

Also Belarus’s lineup can’t easily be foreseen, as coach Georgi Kondratiev selected a young and mostly domestic squad mainly consisting of players from local giants BATE Borisov and Dinamo Minsk.

While the biggest star – veteran midfielder Alexander Hleb – is missing from the squad, three experienced Russian based players were added, among them Sardar Azmoun’s teammate at Rubin Kazan, Syharey Kislyak.

Iran’s possible lineup: A. Haghighi – Montazeri, Hosseini, Sadeghi, Beikzadeh – Teymourian, Nekounam, Hadadifar – Heydari, Ghoochannejhad, Khalatbari