The offer from Saba for Omid Vafaei was heard out and sent back the same day. First bids are rarely meant to succeed; they are meant to find out how loudly the door closes.
Squad28 Jun 2027
Ali Shojaei falls out with a teammate over standards
The oldest argument in any dressing room and the only one that is genuinely about football: one man thinks another is not putting enough in. It is also the row a manager privately does not mind having happened.
At 27 the improving is meant to be over. It is not: 3 points better than the mark taken at the start of the year, which is the sort of thing that happens to players who take the boring parts of the job seriously.
Words at Rah Ahan training over how hard people work
Somebody said out loud what several people had been thinking. Ali Shojaei is at the centre of it, and the squad will now find out whether the standard rises or the pair of them simply stop speaking.
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Rah Ahan this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
36 days, the scan says, and scans are kinder than reality. The fixtures in that window have just become somebody else’s job.
Player ratings8 Feb 2027
Omid Ebrahimi was on a different afternoon to everybody else
9.82. There are performances a supporter describes to somebody who was not there and cannot quite convey; this was one, and the number does not help either.
Squad8 Feb 2027
Words at Rah Ahan training over how hard people work
Somebody said out loud what several people had been thinking. Ali Shojaei is at the centre of it, and the squad will now find out whether the standard rises or the pair of them simply stop speaking.