Perspolis United

The handwriting of Mr.Haan and Mr.De Jong could be seen best by the way Perspolis defended and was organised. This was a perfect example of "ball-oriented-defense", something practiced by the Dutch for more than 30 years, but in Perspolis defense the Dutch were ahead of their time for 20 years. The simple point of it is to defend where the ball is and move as a unit. E.g. when the opponent has the ball on your left side, your team moves more towards the left side as a unit and hence the space of the opponent becomes smaller and it makes it more difficult for him to create something useful. There are many factors speaking for this. One was the amount of balls Perspolis won in midfield and stopped a lot of attacks of Bargh. The second was the constant outnumbering in defense when Bargh was attacking, so that the last pass hardly ever found a player.

Another aspect, although negative one, was that a lot of Perspolis players were at times standing on eachothers legs, but this shows De Jong and Haan's handwriting even more, and the fact that the players need to get used to it. Perspolis went into the game with a lot of key players like Ansarian, Rahbarifard and Kavianpour missing, yet they never looked like a team not getting the 3 points from the game.

They were not relying anymore on Alizadeh's throw-ins as a secret weapon, Pejman Nouri for the first time looked at Perspolis like the promising player he was at Malavan and the players were running in the right directions. A lot of work has to be done on the passing and running, but still, this team looks promising and Arie Haan might just be the best thing that happened to Perspolis and the players will certainly learn a lot from the two.

Another factor that makes it look promising is the fact that with Hamid Estili a Perspolis legend is among the coach team and this should give the team some new calm and the fans should be able to trust them. The chance of Perspolis falling again for side issues should become less.

All in all, what was seen today looks very promising and we should expect more to come from the Dutch masters.