He saved a penalty from Ronaldo, he perfected his long throws by throwing stones when he managed the family flock, he did a thousand jobs before emerging. And now he has stopped Belgium
How did a shepherd from the province of Luristan become a professional footballer capable of saving a penalty from Cristiano Ronaldo at the 2018 World Cup? It is the story of Alireza Beiranvand, who acquires superpowers when he wears the Iran shirt and was also a protagonist in Los Angeles, blocking his goal against Belgium’s attacks. The story of this prodigy goalkeeper begins when, as a boy, he spent his time throwing stones as far as possible while he had to look after the family flock. Those stones became balls and the desire to make them reach tens of meters away was transformed into his ability to make a deep return from his penalty area: with his hands Beiranvand throws the ball over sixty metres, with precision.
the family
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Goalkeeper, yes, but by chance. Because when Alireza starts playing football he does it in the role that (almost) all children want to play: striker. Fate has it that one day a friend of his gets hurt and he finds himself having to replace him… in goal. And from there he never moved again. But how much effort it took to make the family accept this passion. Especially to his father who, in a rage, once tore off his first uniform and gloves: “I was forced to play with my bare hands for a long time”, Beiranvand himself explained, recalling that episode. Working for him had to come first. The game? Woe to talk about it. To fuel his dream, Alireza needed money, so after quitting being a shepherd he first found work in a bakery, then as a street cleaner and then in a car wash where he took advantage of his height (almost two metres) to clean cars at double the speed. One day Ali Daei, the greatest Iranian footballer of all time, who also had a past at Bayern Munich with whom he won the German championship in 1999, stopped by to wash the car there. Alireza would have liked to talk to him then, but he was ashamed of his history and his origins, so he gave up. However, the turning point came in 2011 when Naft Tehran, the team he played for, saw too much talent in him to keep him in the youth team. From there the Iranian national team and the beginning of a story that also took him to Europe, first Antwerp and then Boavista: two adventures that ended badly. But when he puts on the gloves of the national team, no one surpasses Beiranvand.
This is one of the 48 stories that you can read in the Gazzetta’s World Special G+, a protagonist for each country: the great book of the World Cup
