Football: Fans ready to vent anger if Iran fall at final hurdle

Terry Venables and his Australian team are in Iran on the last lap of a long journey which they hope will end with a place in the World Cup finals. Clive White describes what awaits them in Tehran.

As the minutes tick by towards today's kick-off at high noon GMT in the Azadi Stadium, Tehran, one imagines that Australia's young footballers will be feeling about as lonely and exposed as Marshall Will Kane, alias Gary Cooper, when he faced the Frank Miller gang in the classic western of that name.

Only, on this occasion, the local "townsfolk" will be rather more passionately committed than those of Hadleyville - all 100,000 of them.

For 10 days, ever since it became evident that Iran would not qualify directly for next summer's World Cup finals, the tension in Tehran has been building. It had been feared that, because Saturday was a working day, it might affect the gate, but now all afternoon work in the capital has been suspended. It promises - or rather threatens - to be the mother of all crowds.

"It's become a matter of life and death to them," said Hamid Reza Khaladj, an Iranian translator for Fifa, this week - with a rather more chilling sense of realism than Bill Shankly ever intended with a similar remark. "The newspapers are trying to calm the people but everyone here is very, very angry. If we lose the game, personally I think a disaster will happen."

He meant figuratively speaking rather than literally - I think. The hostility which is welling up inside the Iranians is not, however, aimed at the opposition, Australia will be much relieved to hear, but at their own officials and players, whose negligence they believe has been responsible for condemning them to the lottery of the play-offs. Particularly since these play-offs have begun to look less and less like a lottery and more and more like a banker Australian victory.

Up until just a couple of days ago, Iran faced the prospect of having to play the first leg without five of their key players. Four of them picked up second yellow cards in last Sunday's Asian play-off against Japan, a defeat which pitted them into this duel with the winners of the Oceania group, the final play-off to determine the 32nd and last country to qualify for France.

Fortunately for them, following a visit on Monday by the Fifa president, Joao Havelange, world football's governing body revoked the bookings on the grounds that Iran had been at more risk of receiving cautions than Australia, having played many more games. However, the suspension of Karim Bagheri, sent off in the final group match against Qatar for punching an opponent, still stands for the first leg. The ultimate libero, Bagheri was the player who scored seven goals in a World Cup record 17-0 win against the Maldives in June.

Since those heady days of the first round of qualification it has all gone awry for Iran, with much of their problems self-imposed. Many of the players were unhappy with the appointment of Mohammad Mayelikohan as coach and the disaffection eventually boiled over in a blazing row at the pre-match lunch for the final qualifying match against Qatar. It has been suggested that the players deliberately lost the game in order to rid themselyes of the coach, confident that they could beat Japan in the Asian play-off if it came down to that.

Their show of player power was enough to rid themselves of Mayelikohan but was no match for the co-hosts of World Cup 2002, at least not in less- than-neutral Malaysia.

Iran's Olympic coach, a Brazilian called Valdir Viera, has been promoted to take temporary charge of the national team, but it smacks of desperate measures. Only this week the Iran Football Federation, which is facing mounting criticism, let it be known that it intended to appoint Arie Haan, the former Feyenoord coach, as national coach should the team make it to France.

This feeling of being robbed of what they perceive as rightfully theirs goes back even further, to the 1970s when Iran were the undisputed leaders of their continent's football, as reflected in three consectuive victories in the Asian Cup from 1968 to l976.

Scottish fans will recall only too vividly how Ali Parvin's "no-hopers" made a fool of them in the 1978 World Cup in Argentina (even if Scotland's manager, Ally MacLeod, needed little help in that direction).

Until then, with the sole exception of North Korea's Herculean effort in 1966, Asia had achieved next to nothing on the world stage, but Iran's potential, like that of the Koreans, was soon dissipated, first by the all-consuming eight-year war with Iraq and then by the Islamic revolution, which did not take football seriously. But, slowly, attitudes are changing.

Interest in football is increasing all the time and gradually the government is waking up to the fact that the game is capable of doing considerably more for the country's image than wrestling, hitherto its most successful sport, could ever manage. Big business has long since realised the commercial possibilities of such vast crowds.

Senior football in Iran is semi-professional, even though leading clubs like Pirouzi (which is "victory" in Persian) and Esteghlal ("Independence") are regularly watched by crowds of more than 50,000. Only a few players earn a living abroad, although three of their best are thriving in the German Bundesliga: Khodadad Azizi for Cologne, and Ali Daei and Bagheri for Arminia Bielefeld.

Iran must hope that the Italian referee, Pierluigi Pairetto, looks upon them as benovolently as he did the Germans at the climax of Euro 96. As for the Australians, if they can keep their nerve, just as our Gary did in High Noon, and more importantly be first on the draw, it could all end happily for El Tel's boys.