One element that is not talked about much, but IMHO is a big factor in the nature of games played under Wilmots and Skocic is Covid!
After the period of Covid isolation, norm was not the norm anymore. Iran did well in qualifying against Bahrain and Iraq that had an edge over us in earlier games, simply because we had more players that did play in Europe despite isolation, while ME football was submerged in Chaos. It simply became players game despite the coach! This carried on to the next round, and not surprisingly the only team that topped us was the one that had better European based players, Korea.
Skocic was lucky that CQ paved the way for him , indirectly or directly, by the virtue of establishing the culture of playing in Europe even if the opportunity was in less than mid level teams. It was mostly coach players in the field that drew the outcome!
We didn’t have any extensive camps nor top notch assistances to a coach short of international experience. How is it logically possible that all the credit is for the coaching staff? Would he have been able to have same results 2 years earlier? Or even during Wilmots era?