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Guardian - Andranik Teymourian's goals have finally made him feel at home in England, he tells Daniel Taylor.

It was a balmy summer evening in Nuremberg when Andranik Teymourian first came to the attention of Sam Allardyce. Iran were on their way to a 3-1 defeat against Mexico and an early exit from the World Cup finals but for the one Christian in an otherwise Muslim team it was to be a night that opened the door to a new life.

Bolton Wanderers parted with £255,000 to prise Teymourian away from FC AbooMoslem, a Mashhad-based club partly funded by the Iranian military, and there have been the first indications recently that Allardyce has unearthed a bargain. Teymourian has needed time to acclimatise, which is probably only to be expected for a 24-year-old from Tehran with only the most basic grasp of English, but he has now forced his way into a side that travels to Arsenal today still harbouring aspirations of beating them to the Premiership's fourth spot - and a place in next season's Champions League qualifying stages.

Teymourian, or "Ando" as he has become known to his team-mates, has also scored his first Premiership goals, netting twice in Bolton's 3-1 win at Wigan Athletic last weekend, and it is a measure of his popularity in Iran that his match-winning contribution has been shown every hour, on the hour, on the nation's television news channels.

"To be the only Iranian playing in England makes me feel very proud," he says. "I'm hoping I can be a good advert for English football and particularly for Bolton Wanderers. My photograph has been in all the Iranian newspapers and the goals are being replayed all the time. Not many people in Iran knew much of Bolton but I hope there will be people in Tehran wearing Bolton shirts the next time I go home."

An athletic, predominantly right-sided midfielder, Teymourian is regarded by Allardyce as "a player of immense potential" and the fittest professional at the Reebok Stadium by some distance. The fitness coaches set him four different endurance tests on his first day at the club and had to stop him after the first to tell him he needed to pace himself. A puzzled Teymourian asked his interpreter, a pizza shop owner from Burnley, to explain: "This is the speed at which he always goes."

"The culture is not massively different for me in England because what I was doing in Iran I now do here," Teymourian says. "The only problem is the language barrier and for the first five or six months that was really hard. It's getting easier now, though, and I've picked up a lot of the football terms.

"The most important thing for me was to understand my manager and, after that, to learn the other things. Sometimes people here speak really fast and because of their strong accents I don't understand much. But I understand part of what Sam Allardyce is saying now and we get along really well."

It helps him, he says, that he has an entourage of Iranian friends living in the north-west. Acclimatising, however, cannot always have been easy given the recent hostilities between his native country and his adopted one. I came here to play football and I don't want to talk about the political side of it," Teymourian, whose family are of Armenian descent, makes clear early in his interview. "That's a different thing altogether. I am not a politician. All I will say is that the Iranians are good people. You have to have a connection with them, you have to talk to them more and then you will know what sort of people they are."

He is hopeful, he says, that other clubs will take Bolton's lead and start exploring the Iranian Premier League for new players. "I think there are other players who can come over but maybe they have to show themselves in big tournaments such as the World Cup. I am certainly very happy in Bolton. It is like a family and I am really grateful to all the players and the coaches and my manager for the way they have helped me. They have done their best to make me feel welcome and it is very appreciated.

"After the World Cup I had plenty of offers from Arab and German teams but I wanted to play in England because the way the teams play football here you will not see anywhere else in the world. All the top clubs - Manchester United, Chelsea, Arsenal and Liverpool - are always on television back in Iran and I love their style of play. The Iranian television channels are not sophisticated enough to show the lower division teams but the Premiership is always shown and I saw my style suiting English football better than anywhere else. I want to improve my game and I know this is the best place to do that."

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