Two and a half years ago, I visited the Iranian women’s national football team at their hotel in Perth. The plan was to interview the then-coach Maryam Azmoon while the team was in Australia for a set of Olympic qualifiers, including against the Matildas. That was the plan, anyway, because it was not a traditional interview, insofar as one person asks questions and another answers with their genuine thoughts.

There was no way to know if Azmoon’s answers were her genuine thoughts, because her Farsi was interpreted to me by the team’s executive manager, in the presence of a media manager believed by sources to be affiliated with the state’s oppressive regime.

Iran head coach Maryam Azmoon at a press conference in Perth in October, 2023.Credit: Getty

Under these murky rules of engagement, there was also no concrete way of ascertaining which questions could be asked without jeopardising the safety of Azmoon and the players eating dinner around us, and which could not.

I knew what had been publicised. About the Iranian football fan Sahar Khodayari, aka “Blue Girl”, who died in 2019 after setting herself on fire outside a court in Tehran. That, three months earlier, Brazil’s women’s team had landed in Australia for the 2023 World Cup on a plane bearing a giant image of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish-Iranian woman whose death in police custody in September 2022 sparked the most widespread revolt against the government since the Islamic Revolution in 1979, alongside one of male Iranian footballer Amir Nasr Azadani, who was arrested during the protests and sentenced to 26 years in prison.

I also knew what had been told to me in confidence. How Iranian media reports that authorities had finally approved the entry of women into football stadiums in the country had been fabricated to appease FIFA, by allowing a small group of hand-picked women inside for photos and videos.

None of these glaring issues were reflected to me by the smiling coach and her chaperone. And I might almost have believed her, had it not also been apparent that Iranian athletes – not to mention footballers who are also women – were absolutely terrified of speaking out in any way for fear of reprisal against themselves and their families.

Iran coach Marziyeh Jafari (left) and captain Zahra Ghanbari during the press conference on the Gold Coast on Sunday. Credit: AAPIMAGE

The memory of this disconcerting experience returned on Sunday, when current head coach Marziyeh Jafari and forward Zahra Ghanbari sat down on the Gold Coast for their first press conference at the 2026 Asian Cup and did not once address the fact that their country is headline news. The day before, the US and Israel had launched airstrikes on major Iranian cities, including Tehran, triggering retaliatory missile attacks from Iran, and in the hour preceding the press conference, the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, had been confirmed dead.

One of the total of three questions taken by Asian Football Confederation officials asked Jafari and Ghanbari directly how they felt about Khamenei. “I think we shouldn’t talk about these issues right now,” was Jafari’s answer in Farsi. “A team has come for very important competitions that matter a lot to women. Next question, please.”

© WA Today