PLDC - One of Iran’s assistant coaches in the 2022 World Cup has admitted to the mistakes of the technical staff for the arrangement of players leading to 6-2 humiliating loss to England in the opening match.
Roger De Sa has provided some details about the match in an interview with Marawa Sports Worldwide.
The South African coach said that the plan was to “get a draw” against England. “To be honest with you, when we started the game, our plan was to try and get a draw, we knew that we would have to defend and make the game pretty ugly,” he said.
“Playing with five at the back, it was something that they [Iran] had never done before and we tried it out, we didn’t have enough time to prepare and it failed … It was the game that the coaches put out and it didn’t work at all,” admitted the coach.
With just two months remaining to the tournament, Iran’s football federation decided to fire Dragan Skocic, who had actually led the team to the World Cup finals and sign Carlos Queiroz back to Iran after more than three years.
This was the third back-to-back World Cup finals that Queiroz was leading the team and yet again, the team failed to secure a spot in the knockout round in Qatar with two losses to England and the USA, and one win against Wales.
The technical staff as well as the Iranian federation officials have been targets of criticism by fans and experts for the results, especially the defeat against England.
De Sa said all they were thinking after receiving the fourth goal was “how to stop bleeding.”
“I must say that there was a stage when it got to 4-0, the only thing that you can think of on the bench is how do you stop the bleeding … I think the third and the fourth goal was so quick, you didn’t even have time to realize from 2-0 down to 4-0 that now this could be a record and we might be in the record book for the wrong reason,” he said.
The technical staff “made few changes” and returned to the 4-3-3 format while also bringing Sardar Azmoun into the pitch, which led to a better performance and scoring two goals.
“We made the score slightly better than 6-0 or 8-0,” he said.
The Iranian federation is yet to decide on prospects of cooperation with Queiroz and his staff.