Optimize conditioning of players is Carlos Queiroz’s message

Persianfootball.com – TEHRAN, Carlos Queiroz, a world-class coach who has been praised for his ability to bring unprecedented discipline, planning and organization to Iran’s oft-petty footballing culture, has been able to orchestrate two camps that he and the coaching staff hope will help propel Iran to new World Cup heights and success.

When the former Real Madrid coach mapped and submitted a detailed programme to the Iranian Football Federation less than a year ago – after securing Iran’s berth to the most famous sporting global event, the 2014 World Cup – he was sounding off to Iranian officials and players that he intended to make some noise in Brazil. The old adage that “We Are Happy to Be Here” was not going to cut it with the forthright and straight-forward Portuguese:  he intended to take Asia’s top-ranked team as far as he could.

At the heart of this plan was to optimize the physical conditioning and training of Asia’s historically most technically-proficient team. Like most Asian countries, stamina and world-class conditioning lays at the heart of the problem for Iran’s team, especially when playing no-nonsense and physically durable Eastern European and African teams. Queiroz devised a plan to rectify this serious shortcoming. Logistically, Carlos Queiroz imagined the South African and Austrian camps: which were meant to be filled with vital friendlies and conditioning programs that were novel to many of Iran’s players to enhance their peak performance capacity.

Now almost a year later, Team Melli is seeing Queiroz’s vision for hardline physical training come to fruition, albeit with a few hiccups on the road, such as not having all of the Team Melli players because of club commitments. However, these disruptions have not derailed Queiroz’s plans, who refuses to cave-in and deviate from his short-term goals and long-term plans. Iranian players are now being given insight into their conditioning levels with such world-class technology like GPS Sport, a multi-faceted technology that gathers comprehensive metrics from each player and delivers that information to the coaching staff.  A tool, no doubt, which will help Queiroz take Iran’s 23 best-conditioned players to Brazil. Players, such as Hossein Mahini, Mohammad Reza Khalatbari, Karim Ansarifard and Mehrdad Pouladi have talked about how rigorous these camps and Queiroz’s training programmes have been and how it is not comparable to anything that they have been a part of.

Queiroz’s coaching staff has included fitness coaches Mikko Kujala and Mehdi Safaei, performance coach Diego Giachhino and assistant coach Oceano da Cruz, who have all emphasized Queiroz’s tune: if we want to succeed in Brazil, we must combine peak physical shape with technical soundness. One will not work without the other.