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Looking for a level playing field

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If non-sports lovers think the European game of soccer is confusing, spare a thought for the players and fans in Iran.

While the game's rules remain the same in Tehran as anywhere else, the Iranian government's regulations about who can play and watch the games are as complex as the pattern of a Persian rug.

Following the 1979 Iranian Revolution, female soccer fans were banned from attending public sporting events in their homeland.

Then unexpectedly in April, the country's controversial president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, an avid soccer fan, announced that the decades-old restriction on women was over. Women would be allowed to enter stadiums to watch sporting events, but would be seated in separate sections.

But a few weeks later, Iran's supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has the last word on what is permissible behaviour in Iran, insisted that Mr Ahmadinejad's sporting declaration was null and void.

While Iran's ruling elite and ordinary Iranians continue to debate the Ayatollah's contentious ruling, a dozen young Iranian women are determined to keep their eyes firmly on the ball. And not just as fans, but as players on the field.

As members of Iran's first all-female soccer team, they have shaken their country's notion of what roles women can play not only on the field, but in society as a whole.

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