Klinsmann: ‘I want to settle things down with Queiroz’
QATAR WORLD CUP | IRAN
Jurgen Klinsmann said he never wanted to criticize Iran and that ‘things were taken out of context’.
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Jurgen Klinsmann, the German former player and coach, and currently a member of FIFA’s technical team at the 2022 Qatar World Cup, said he wants to settle things down with Iran boss Carlos Queiroz, in order to clarify the statement he gave to the BBC, which made the Portuguese and the Iranian federation very upset, the latter asking for the german’s resignation from the aforementioned technical team.
Klinsmann said when speaking with the British news channel that he intends to speak to Queiroz to ‘settle things down’, as he feels that ‘there were things that got taken out of context’. ‘I’ll try to call him and calm things down’, he said.
‘I never criticized Carlos nor the Iranian bench. Some even thought I was criticizing the referee, he didn’t do anything about the way they were behaving on the bench’, the 1990 World Cup champion added.
‘All I did was to describe his emotional way of doing things, which is admirable in some way. The whole bench is vividly experiencing the game. They’re jumping up and down and Carlos is a very emotional coach, he’s constantly trying to give his players all his energy and direction’, Klinsmann explained.
The Iranian Federation recently announced they had formally complained to FIFA after his statement, something they consider contrary to their understanding of football and to their whole country. The Federation then asked Klinsmann to apologize and to present his resignation as a member of the Technical Study Group at the 2022 Qatar World Cup.
Furthermore, the Iranian association explained that aside from ‘numerous unfortunate statements about the Iranian national team and its personnel’, the German former coach and player ‘made judgements about the Iranian culture’.
The statement from the Iranian Federation mentioned Klinsmann’s words as proof: ‘The players and the team personnel gave some hard work to the referee: It’s no coincidence, it’s part of their culture, of their gameplay. They made the referee work very hard’.
Likewise, ‘the Iranian national team would like to invite Mr. Klinsmann to the Melli team’s camp in Doha to get to know the millenary persian culture, and the values of football and sport’.
The organization pointed out that despite being German, Klinsmann ‘won’t be judged for the most embarrassing episode in the history of the World Cup, the ‘Gijon disgrace’ of 1982, when West Germany and Austria fixed the result of a game’.
After that, Queiroz himself made an echo of the matter through his official social media account, with a thread of messages to Klinsmann, accusing him of questioning his character ‘with a typical prejudicial judgment of superiority’ and without personally knowing him.
‘How much I can respect what you did in the field doesn’t matter. Those comments about Iran’s culture, the national team and my players are an embarrassment to football. Nobody can hurt our integrity if they’re not at our level, of course’, Queiroz said, who also wants to invite Klinsmann to the Iranian camp at the World Cup in Doha, so he can ‘socialize with the Iranian players and learn about their country, the people of Iran, their poets and art, algebra, all that millenary art, the persian culture, and also to hear how much these players love and respect football’.
