Tehran - Iran coach Ali Daei said on Friday that there was nothing he could do about the political impacts currently affecting the Iranian team, after Egypt were the latest team to cancel a scheduled friendly game against Iran. "Considering sports apart from politics is nothing but an international slogan and especially football is directly linked to politics," Daei told the ISNA news agency.
"As a coach I can only do my job as making politics is the job of others," said the frustrated Daei, who formerly played in the German Bundesliga for Bielefeld, Bayern Munich and Berlin.
The Iranian national team is currently in a training camp in Spain. It was supposed to play against two Spanish teams as well as England's Charlton Athletics, but all three clubs cancelled the game.
Iran accused especially Charlton of having cancelled the game due to political reasons, namely the missile tests made last week and warnings by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards that Israel could be target of these missiles. Charlton officials have dismissed this.
Now the Egyptian Football Association (EFA) on Friday in Cairo cancelled the game with Iran scheduled for August 20 in the United Arab Emirates.
Egypt's shaky relations with Iran took a new bend after the emergence of the Iranian documentary "Assassination of a Pharaoh", which glorifies the killing of late president Anwar el-Sadat in 1981. The documentary was deemed offensive by the Egyptian government and media.
"We have been discussing the situation with the Egyptian Foreign Ministry during the past few days and we finally decided to cancel the match so it would not provoke in one way or another, further tensions," EFA president Samir Zaher was quoted by al-Jazeera news channel as saying.
Due to the Iranian nuclear programmes and anti-Israeli statements by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the last two years, many national teams have refrained to play test games against Iran.
Iran is preparing itself for the next 2010 World Cup qualification games and desperately needs test-games before the next qualifier match against Saudi Arabia on September 6.
