For Iran, it really is a case of life and death
IF YOU thought England players sometimes tread a delicate line between football and politics, some perspective is provided by their opponents tomorrow, Iran, where it could literally be a matter of life or death.
With the United Nations special rapporteur reporting that there have been more than 14,000 arrests and at least 277 deaths in Iran since the protests in response to the death in police custody of Mahsa Amini, the national team here have been placed in an almost-impossible situation.
Amini was the 22-year-old woman who had been detained by morality police for wearing her headscarf incorrectly and whose death sparked the wave of protests in Iran.
And the football team has not been able to avoid the turmoil. Iran’s coach Carlos Queiroz, the former Manchester United No2, who oversaw their World Cup campaigns in 2014 and 2018, is said to have come under pressure not to pick Bayer Leverkusen striker Sardar Azmoun.
Azmoun had expressed his sympathy with protestors and wrote on his Instagram account: ‘At worst, I’ll be dismissed from the national team. No problem. I’d sacrifice that for one hair on the heads of Iranian women. This story will not be deleted. They can do whatever they want. Shame on you for killing so easily; long live Iranian women.’
Their star man is Mehdi Taremi, the Porto striker, who won UEFA’s prize for the best goal of the 2020-21 Champions League, with his overhead kick against Chelsea, and who has also offered support.
‘Given what is happening in Iran, I couldn’t celebrate the goals,’ he said after Porto’s 4-1 over Sporting Braga in the Champions League. ‘I couldn’t out of respect for my people. I am here for them too.’
However, for many Iranians, these statements have not been enough. The players have been vehemently criticised for posing with President Ebrahim Raisi on Monday before travelling to Qatar and presenting him with a national team shirt.
Taremi might wear a black wristband in solidarity with protestors but he also celebrated ecstatically when he scored the winner against Uruguay in September, when non celebration is seen as standing with protestors.
The question tomorrow will be whether the team will follow the example of Iranian basketball, beach football, water polo and sitting volleyball teams, which have recently declined to sing the national anthem at international events. Beach footballer Saaed Piramoon went a step further, miming the hair cutting gesture adopted by women as symbol of protest as his goal celebration. Many Iranians think the World Cup footballers should do more.
When the national team played Nicaragua this month only two players, Mahdi Torabi and Vahid Amiri, sung the anthem. Against Senegal in September, the team wore black tracksuits to mourn the deaths of protestors. Should they do something similar tomorrow, on a world stage, it would be an even greater embarrassment for the supreme leader of the country, Ayatollah Ali Khomeini.
The stakes were already high enough here in Qatar, with the team being drawn against the USA, England and Wales. Great Britain is dubbed a ‘little Satan’ by Iranian authorities but it is USA which is the ‘Great Satan’ and the US fixture is a reprise of the 1998 World Cup game, which saw Iran win 2-1.
The tension would explain the terse exchanges English journalists have had with Queiroz and former Brighton wide man Alireza Jahanbakhsh in recent days.
As Jahanbakhsh put it: ‘We are here for our duty and our duty is to play football. If you asked me this question [about the protests] outside my duty to the national team, I would have answered the question with a different view.’
This appears to be a World Cup where sport and politics are impossible to disentangle.