PERSIAN JEWEL
Everything kicked off on an odd, dusty pitch in Bushehr, a port city in the South of Iran where temperatures exceed 40°C in the summers and people swim in the sea at midnight to escape the extreme heat and humidity. Every day, a six-year-old Mehdi Taremi would make his way past an old mosque and through narrow alleyways to reach this peculiar ground. The pitch owes its uniqueness to a large, century-old tree right in the middle, which Mehdi and the other kids learned to make a feature of their regular football games.
“The pitch was a dust bowl. Our goalposts were placed at the opposite sides of that old tree,” recalls Taremi. “Chopping it off was not an option. So, we had to find a way around it. Sometimes we made a pass to it and played one-twos with it.”
Fast forward more than two decades and Mehdi Taremi has won the Portuguese League’s Golden Boot, made it into
