Brave Azmoun merits support for his stand
GIVEN the strangest World Cup we will ever know is less than two months away – and who isn’t looking forward to watching Poland v Saudi Arabia when they should be Christmas shopping? – it only seemed right that last week’s set of internationals felt a little bit weird.
We had Richard Dunne evoking ghosts of Ireland teams past on Virgin Media when he suggested Gareth Southgate was setting up England like San Marino. To be fair to Dunne, he didn’t shudder when mentioning the minnows, even though he was part of Steve Staunton’s team that stumbled to a 2-1 win there in 2007.
There haven’t been many managers in the history of the game as cautious and conservative as Southgate, although Carlos Quieroz is one. As fate would have it, these two great footballing minds clash on the second day of the World Cup when England meet Iran. Rarely has there been an opening group game with goalless draw painted all over it.
All the same, we will be up for Team Melli. And not because of some daft, deep-seated desire to see the English team fall flat on their faces. No. It is because we hope that Sardar Azmoun will try to take advantage of Harry Maguire’s latest calamity. There is unlikely to be a more courageous footballer in Qatar than the Bayer Leverkusen striker. That is, if Quieroz is allowed to select one of his most talented players.
ROBBIE Brady’s penalty in the Aviva Stadium felt pretty significant, even if it did little to quell the annoyance of a simmering Damien Delaney, but it was not the most important goal scored last Tuesday.
That occurred behind the closed doors of a nondescript stadium in suburban Vienna. Azmoun, known as the ‘Persian Messi’ had only been on the field less than five minutes when he hit the second-half equaliser that ensured Iran and Senegal played out a 1-1 draw in what was a final World Cup warm-up for both.
However, the celebration for the 41st international goal was muted. Understandably so. A few days earlier, the 27-year-old had taken to Instagram to criticise the repressive Iranian regime, following the death of Mahsa Amini, a young Kurdish woman, in police custody. She had been arrested after a strand of her hair was visible under her hijab.
‘Ashamed of you all, how carelessly people are murdered.
Iranian women live long,’ Azmoun posted to his four million followers. ‘We weren’t allowed to say anything but I can’t take silence any more’. The ultimate punishment would be for them to kick me off the team, but that would be a small sacrifice compared to every single strand of hair on an Iranian woman.’
The post was deleted not long after appearing and his account was blocked. Azmoun is the biggest sports star in the country, but what he did last weekend still took unbelievable courage. He wasn’t only risking his international career in a World Cup year, but also his own health. Sporting prowess offers no shield when standing up against Iran’s theocratic regime, as was proven by the execution of wrestler Navid Afkari two years ago, despite worldwide calls, including from the International Olympic Committee, for him to be pardoned.
Azmoun will suggest his bravery is nothing compared to that of the thousands of Iranians, male and female, on the streets of Tehran and other cities, protesting Amini’s death and the systematic discrimination of women under Islamic rule. And he would be right. He is a rich and successful footballer playing for one of the biggest sides in Germany. He may be jeopardising a place in the World Cup, but last Wednesday, one Norwegian human rights group had claimed that 76 protestors had lost their lives in a crackdown by Iranian security forces.
Azmoun’s stance matters, though, because football matters greatly in Iran. It has long been the powerhouse of the Asian game although, for around a decade after the Islamic revolution in 1979, the ruling mullahs did try to repress the game they considered foreign and decadent.
But as David Goldblatt points out in his peerless work, The Age of Football, the game was simply too popular. By the 1990s, a national league was re-established and Iran were again flexing their muscles, qualifying at the 1998 World Cup, which led to wild celebrations and even a 2-1 win over the USA (or ‘the Great Satan’ as Ayatollah Khomeini used to call it) in France in the most politically-charged sporting contest since the Miracle on Ice.
The draw just had to throw Iran and the US together again in the most divisive and politically explosive World Cup in history.
They meet at the same time as England play Wales in the final group game. I know which one I will be watching.
Back in 2002, it was the Ireland side inspired by Roy Keane who denied Iran a place in the World Cup. But they were back four years later. Their tense qualifying play-off win over Bahrain provides the backdrop for a wonderfully charming Iranian movie, Offside, that I’d highly recommend.
Under the guise of comedy, director Jafar Panahi tackles the serious issue of female discrimination as a group of young women football fanatics disguise themselves as boys in an effort to defy the allmen rule and get into the stadium to see the World Cup play-off.
ONE of the more interesting aspects of the film is that some of the fans going to the game clock that they are women, but none are too perturbed by this – one boy spots the disguise of one of the fans and only winks at her. In such a subtle way, Offside was showing the dichotomy between what the average Iranian thinks and their theocratic rulers.
When Iran booked their place in Qatar earlier this year with a 1-0 play-off win over Iraq, there were 2,000 women allowed into the Azadi Stadium in Tehran – mainly because of pressure from FIFA which threatened the nation with World Cup expulsion. Women were seated in a section separate from men and had to enter and exit via a female-only gate.
However this small gesture, nothing more than a sop to the powers-that-be, wasn’t an indication that attitudes were softening as recent images on our television screens have illustrated.
Azmoun hasn’t been the only Iranian player to make a stand in the past week. The entire team wore black jackets over their national team shirt for the anthem last week in solidarity with Amini and the protests. Former internationals Ali Daei and Ali Karimi have both posted their support on social media.
But nobody has been as vocal as Azmoun, who even wrote a week ago: ‘If these people are Muslims, may God make me an infidel.’
Azmoun was an international volleyball player before becoming a professional footballer.
And that sport remains his first love, setting up a female volleyball team in his hometown with his father, even paying the players a salary. As he has stated, he did this to give female athletes in Iran a chance they rarely get.
However, it is his courage last week that has made Sardar Azmoun stand out. I know who I’ll be keeping an eye out for in the Champions League this week – a player I hope to see torment Maguire in a few weeks’ time.