Iran Football Special: Green Movement Shoots! It Scores!

Hat-tip to Gearóid Ó Cuinn and Saoirse Roche, who brought out this story in The Guardian of London:

I think it's fair to say that a few people in Iran are passionate about football. And, throughout the post-election crisis, a lot of them have been matching up that passion to protests: Green wristbands, chants inside and outside stadiums, conversion of the Red and Blue of Iran's top club teams (Persepolis and Esteghlal) to Green.

Earlier this month, however, the fans found a new, mischievous way to make their point. The "90" show (named after the 90 minutes of a football match) had one of those universal phone-ins with the chance of winning a prize: "What caused the recent decline of the Iranian national football team?"

Like most phone-ins, there was one clearly right answer --- "(a) Management" --- amidst clearly wrong ones. "(C) The best generation of players had left the team" was for football morons, since all nine members of Iran's 2006 World Cup squad are still in prime form.

Except it didn't go that way. Green supporters passed on a text message urging people to vote for "C", which in 1 1/2 hours racked up 1.1 million votes out of a record total of 1.85 million phone-ins.


A bit of phone-in fun now risked becoming subversion of national security (and EA readers know what the charge is for that offense). So the presenter squirmed before the live programme, scheduled for three hours, mysteriously disappeared.

The vanishing of "90" may also have been prompted by an interview with the former head of the Iranian Football Federation, Mohammad Dadkan:

I am proud of three things in my life. The first is that I received recognition from [President Mohammad] Khatami [now a prominent figure in the opposition]. The second was that I took the national team to the World Cup. The third was that I was expelled during the time of Ali Abadi [minister for sport in the Ahmadinejad administration]. Sorry that I mentioned names but I had to

Oops. Own goal for the Government; 1-0 to the Greens. No wonder this match had to be abandoned.

However, before state media blew the whistle, Dadkan let a final shot fly: "Respect, affection and honesty are essential if our world is to succeed. I am talking about the football world, of course."