"While I congratulate my players and Tractor fans for this victory. I was not satisfied with the team's performance today. We were not close to our real level.

"I hope we do better in the second leg. In some games where the team is not performing well, it is important to win. We played against a strong team and our performance will definitely be better in the second leg,” said Skokic. 

Al Khaldiya looked to be cruising after Mohamed Al Romaihi gave them a 48th minute lead but were undone with quick strikes from Amirhossein Hosseinzadeh and Domagoj Drozdek with head coach Ali Ashour admitting they were shocked by the defeat. 

"For me, it is important to play beautiful football but the most important thing is to achieve results. Everyone is sad and shocked by this result, as we prepared the players mentally because this match is the first half of the challenge. 

"We have to recover and plan for the return match and it doesn’t matter that we have to play away from home,” said Ashour.

The sides meet again on Tuesday in Tabriz.