Today was CQ's birthday. He turned 64 years old. Happy birthday dear CQ. Best wishes for you and our national team. I am huge critic of his behavior and misconducts sometimes (For example, he also had tension and clash with Portugal, South Africa, and UAE federations), but I can never forget he rescued our team when he took over from worst coaches (Daei and Ghotbi) we had from 1995. He was handed the weakest generation of players we had from 1995. He improved the defense, made the team very organize, improved the discipline of the team million times and Fifa Ranking, added Dejagah and Ghoochannejhad to the team, and qualified the team to the WC 2014 as group winner! Fortunately in this campaign, the generation of players is better than last campaign. Also if it was not because of CQ, we would not have seen the likes of Jahanbakhsh, Milad Mohammadi, etc in the Europe. He invited many players from the Iranian Diaspora, although he knew majority of them are not national team material. He did that to motivate the local players to move to the Europe and this is very important for improving Iran NT. If it was not because of him, we would not have seen Dejagah and Gucci in the team and we would have missed the last WC for sure. At the WC, It would not have been fair to expect more because of the status the team had before his arrival. In terms of results, I can only criticize him for quarter-final match at Asian Cup although we played almost the whole game with 10 men. For 2018, I expect smoother qualification to the WC and better results than last WC something like 2 points or more although it depends on the draw if we qualify to the WC. My best memory from CQ is the last 3 games of WCQs 2014 where we had to win all three games to qualify and we won all three games. No one predicted 3 victories before those games. If it was not because of his pressure on IFF and connections, we would have played our Ulsan game a few hours earlier than other game and our trip to Ulsan would have been longer. Sometimes I criticize CQ and get mad of him but I can never dislike him from bottom of my heart. Wining the last 3 games of last qualifiers still make me emotional. We all know that when he leaves we will not get another coach at his level or a better coach than himself most likely so we should be happy with him at the moment. Out of all coaches we had from 1996 to now, IMO, only big man Tomislav Ivic is comparable to CQ. Kudos to you big man CQ. Anyway time to focus on the rest of campaign which will be very hard.
I compared our WC 2014 squad with Asian Cup 2011 squad. Only 35% of Asian Cup 2011 squad was in WC 2014 squad.