Despite being the golden boy of Iran’s football and the hero who took Iran to the finals of the FIFA World Cup finals in Brazil, Reza Ghoochannejad has no place in the his club thanks to the Israeli coach of the Belgian Club , Standard Liege.

With their Israeli coach, Guy Luzon , Team Melli goal scorer is not only sidelined in his club, Ghoochannejad frequently finds himself not even in the list of 18 players for league matches.  To ensure that Ghoochannejad has no place in the team, the Israeli coach has recruited two of his own Israeli players to fill Ghoochannejad place.  Dudu Biton and Tal Ben Haim have recently joined Standard Liege to add the weight of Israeli flavor in the Belgian team.

With maximum points from 7 games in the Belgium pro-league, no one is too overly concerned with the plight of Ghoochannejad in Liege or whether his exclusion from the team line-up is justified.  There is little or no eyebrows raised either on relegating the Iranian star player to a mere peripheral reserve. No question arising if the Israeli coach ignoring the Iranian player is politically or patriotically motivated act or is it purely technical.  It must be said that the Israeli Guy Luzon has indemnified himself quite well, and certainly covered all angles by his team’s excellent results in the league so far.

Guy Luzon,  a former footballer who represented his country,  is also the nephew of the current chairman of the Israel Football Association, Avi Luzon. All of his activities in football and achievements were in his homeland Israel where the peak of his accomplishment was coaching of Israel U-21 team. His first work outside Israel is the coaching Standard Liege. It is pretty naive to think that Luzon is acting purely on technical and ethical terms. With the political hatred between the two countries leaders, and the rhetoric exchanged between them on every little opportunity, it should not be a surprise that such discrimination can occur between high profile citizens of each country. The motive being for one race to teach another some lessons or at least, flexing of a muscle.

Guy Luzon who served in the Israel defense forces no doubt had received a good doze of ideological training guiding him to identify who the enemy is. The same cannot be said about Ghoochannejad who left Iran as a boy and was not exposed to the Iranian system of political anti-Israeli ideological education.

Whatever the case, it seems that the only loser in this episode is no one by Reza Ghoochannejad and Team Melli. Reza, no doubt a promising and competent scorer, proved by the valuable goals he scored in the World Cup qualifiers, is nailed to the bench of Standard liege. At best , his only hope is to get a few appearances in reserve or in Europa Cup out of necessity due to roster rotation that clubs normally practice.His next window of opportunity comes on the New Year or the winter transfer period. Whether Ghoochannejad will maintain his competitive edge and form, is the big question that Queiroz no doubt is already concerned with.

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