Losing out on the last 16 once is painful. Losing out on it twice in the cruelest of fashions is the kind of thing that makes you question whether football actually has it in for you. And yet that is exactly the hand Iran have been dealt at the World Cup, not once but twice across two separate tournaments.
According to BBC Sport, Iran have had their place in the knockout rounds snatched away from them at the very last moment on two separate occasions. That is a genuinely extraordinary piece of bad luck, and it deserves to be talked about more than it is. Most fans in Europe barely pay attention to Iran's World Cup campaigns, but when you dig into the details it is hard not to feel a bit sorry for them.
Football can be brutal. Everyone knows that. A team can do almost everything right and still end up on the wrong side of a result because of timing, goal difference, or some last-minute drama happening on another pitch. It happens to clubs in league football all the time, and there is a reason supporters find it so gut-wrenching. Now imagine that happening to your national team on the biggest stage of all, and not just once.
Iran are not a side that gets talked about as one of the great football nations, but they are consistently one of the strongest teams in Asia and they clearly have the quality to compete at a World Cup. The fact that they keep getting this close to the last 16 and then falling just short in such painful fashion says something about the gap between them and the established powers, but also about the sheer randomness that makes tournament football so dramatic and occasionally so unfair.
Whether they are officially the unluckiest side in World Cup history is debatable, but they are absolutely in the conversation. Someone somewhere in Tehran must be absolutely done with this tournament by now, and honestly, who could blame them.
Let me know your thoughts.