Tehran-23 – Newspaper Kommersant No. 50 (7495) dated 03/24/2023
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In its first friendly match in 2023, the Russian national team in Tehran drew with a score of 1: 1 with the most status among the rivals they inherited after the international suspension – the Iranians. The Russians were leading after the first half, but the draw, given the colossal advantage of the Iranian team in the second half, should be considered a very successful outcome for the guests.
The potential trump card of the Tehran version of the Russian national team – extremely experimental, or something, as is often the case in friendly matches that do not carry a special semantic load in the form, for example, of leading players to an important tournament – was easy to discern. In this version, the 30-year-old Daler Kuzyaev did not look like a veteran, but a dinosaur. 27-year-old Nikolay Komlichenko, Anton Miranchuk, Vyacheslav Karavaev and 28-year-old Maxim Osipenko looked like veterans. And the youth of the base hinted at the freshness of the game, which can compensate for the lack of persuasiveness.
Feelings did not seem to fail. There was a lot of freshness in Russian football. And it was combined, of course, with constant mistakes – in transmissions, maneuvers. In the movements, feints of Iranian football players, although not all of them were the people thanks to whom the hosts performed quite decently at the Qatari World Cup at the end of last year (and, of course, they did not do without experiments and stars like Serdar who did not take part in the match Azmun), there was more class. But he didn’t help at all. Nimble, ready for rapid transformations, the Russian team held up very well.
Moreover, in the middle of the first half, it was she who opened the scoring. The most active player among the guests, although there were no passive ones among them in principle, was Anton Zinkovsky. He acted in different parts of the field, but more often, of course, in his favorite position – to the left of the gate. There he went to the stroke on Said Ezatollakhi, who has more than enough experience in top matches, and made sure that he violated the rules already in the penalty area. The penalty was taken by Miranchuk, and he was amazingly cold-blooded.
Then for some time it was possible to admire how the Russian team does its homework to repel other people’s attacks. It was an almost perfect-looking game in defense – compact, collective, with synchronous movements of all layers. The Iranians suffered.
And their maximum in such a situation was an episode in which Mehdi Taremi, after a long and tedious reshuffling of partners, nevertheless hit his head. But the blow was delivered from a dozen and a half meters, and did not cause any problems to goalkeeper Matvey Safonov. Moreover, Taremi, the famous sniper of Porto, a fighter of the front line, in this segment was forced to regularly retreat for the ball to the central circle, helping to deploy the attack. And this was also a good sign for the Russian team, saying that Iranian schemes and ideas are not working well.
Only the Russian team did not stay long as such a defensive standard. Ten minutes later, the standard was transformed into an example of how not to defend yourself. The layers sank deeper and deeper, with tremendous difficulty the selected ball was immediately lost. And in the game of the Iranian national team, the real sharpness finally appeared. On the left, Mohammad Mohebi fell out onto the Russian gate and missed. Then Safonov dragged a tight long-range shot. Corner kicks and free kicks have become the norm for Iranians. The Russian national team was lucky that the hosts did not grow together with them.
What the Iranians did not succeed before the break, it turned out immediately after it – thanks to a very creepy Russian blunder. Ruslan Litvinov, on the border of the penalty area, on the side of the goal, for some reason fell on Shakhriyar Moganlu, who, in principle, did not pose any threat, stepped on his foot, and the Iranian team achieved their penalty. Mehdi Taremi beat Safonov as confidently as Miranchuk beat Alireza Beiranvand.
Having conceded, the Russian team went through a period of too obvious confusion, which the Iranians squandered, and then nevertheless got used to the field again.
She still sometimes faked it, but at least the inevitable catastrophe no longer smelled. The guests played football, maybe not flashy, but at least dynamic and tenacious enough. In order to force the Iranian rear to strain, it was terribly small. In order to save the result, which, given the formal status of the opponent, could be called worthy, without any brilliance, in suffering, allowing the hosts to deliver two dozen blows, it is enough. Although in the end, the Russian team, strictly speaking, was saved from defeat only by luck in the form of a strange mistake by Taremi. The striker, after another failure of the Russian defense and a neat chest rebate from Mohebi, shot Safonov from about a penalty mark, but did not score.
It was the third consecutive draw for the Russian national team in the friendly matches it had after being suspended from international competition. In the fall of 2022, the Russians, having defeated the Kyrgyz team, parted ways – 0:0 – with the Tajik and Uzbek teams.
The Russian team will play the next friendly match on Sunday: in St. Petersburg, it will host the Iraqi team.
Iran-Russia 1:1
Taremi, 47 (pen.) — Anton Miranchuk, 28 (pen.).
Russia: Matvey Safonov – Vyacheslav Karavaev, Maxim Osipenko, Ruslan Litvinov – Daniil Khlusevich (Alexander Silyanov, 87), Daler Kuzyaev (Danil Prutsev, 87), Danil Glebov, Anton Miranchuk (Daniil Fomin, 78), Arsen Zakharyan (Ivan Oblyakov, 69) , Anton Zinkovsky (Ilzat Akhmetov, 87) – Nikolay Komlichenko (Konstantin Tyukavin, 78).
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