|
Guardian - Andranik Teymourian's goals have
finally made him feel at home in England, he tells Daniel Taylor.
It was a balmy summer evening in Nuremberg when Andranik Teymourian first
came to the attention of Sam Allardyce. Iran were on their way to a 3-1
defeat against Mexico and an early exit from the World Cup finals but for
the one Christian in an otherwise Muslim team it was to be a night that
opened the door to a new life.
Bolton Wanderers parted with £255,000 to prise
Teymourian away from FC AbooMoslem, a Mashhad-based club partly funded by
the Iranian military, and there have been the first indications recently
that Allardyce has unearthed a bargain. Teymourian has needed time to
acclimatise, which is probably only to be expected for a 24-year-old from
Tehran with only the most basic grasp of English, but he has now forced his
way into a side that travels to Arsenal today still harbouring aspirations
of beating them to the Premiership's fourth spot - and a place in next
season's Champions League qualifying stages.
Teymourian, or "Ando" as he has become known to his team-mates, has also
scored his first Premiership goals, netting twice in Bolton's 3-1 win at
Wigan Athletic last weekend, and it is a measure of his popularity in Iran
that his match-winning contribution has been shown every hour, on the hour,
on the nation's television news channels.
"To be the only Iranian playing in England
makes me feel very proud," he says. "I'm hoping I can be a good advert for
English football and particularly for Bolton Wanderers. My photograph has
been in all the Iranian newspapers and the goals are being replayed all the
time. Not many people in Iran knew much of Bolton but I hope there will be
people in Tehran wearing Bolton shirts the next time I go home."
An athletic, predominantly right-sided midfielder, Teymourian is regarded by
Allardyce as "a player of immense potential" and the fittest professional at
the Reebok Stadium by some distance. The fitness coaches set him four
different endurance tests on his first day at the club and had to stop him
after the first to tell him he needed to pace himself. A puzzled Teymourian
asked his interpreter, a pizza shop owner from Burnley, to explain: "This is
the speed at which he always goes."
"The culture is not massively different for me in England because what I was
doing in Iran I now do here," Teymourian says. "The only problem is the
language barrier and for the first five or six months that was really hard.
It's getting easier now, though, and I've picked up a lot of the football
terms.
"The most important thing for me was to understand my manager and, after
that, to learn the other things. Sometimes people here speak really fast and
because of their strong accents I don't understand much. But I understand
part of what Sam Allardyce is saying now and we get along really well."
It helps him, he says, that he has an entourage of Iranian friends living in
the north-west. Acclimatising, however, cannot always have been easy given
the recent hostilities between his native country and his adopted one. I
came here to play football and I don't want to talk about the political side
of it," Teymourian, whose family are of Armenian descent, makes clear early
in his interview. "That's a different thing altogether. I am not a
politician. All I will say is that the Iranians are good people. You have to
have a connection with them, you have to talk to them more and then you will
know what sort of people they are."
He is hopeful, he says, that other clubs will take Bolton's lead and start
exploring the Iranian Premier League for new players. "I think there are
other players who can come over but maybe they have to show themselves in
big tournaments such as the World Cup. I am certainly very happy in Bolton.
It is like a family and I am really grateful to all the players and the
coaches and my manager for the way they have helped me. They have done their
best to make me feel welcome and it is very appreciated.
"After the World Cup I had plenty of offers from Arab and German teams but I
wanted to play in England because the way the teams play football here you
will not see anywhere else in the world. All the top clubs - Manchester
United, Chelsea, Arsenal and Liverpool - are always on television back in
Iran and I love their style of play. The Iranian television channels are not
sophisticated enough to show the lower division teams but the Premiership is
always shown and I saw my style suiting English football better than
anywhere else. I want to improve my game and I know this is the best place
to do that."
|
