Dzeko has been a crucial player for his country since his international debut in 2007, and has 73 goals in 147 appearances – scoring every year for the past two decades. <\/p>\n
Until as recently as last year he was still reaching double figures for goals at club level.<\/p>\n
Last summer, he returned to Serie A to sign for Fiorentina and, at the time, dismissed suggestions he was slowing down with age.<\/p>\n
“Age doesn’t matter, I’m not a write-off yet,” he said. <\/p>\n
“Behind all this is the work that a 39-year-old has to do, even more than others. I feel good, we’re working hard, and this will bring us satisfaction later.”<\/p>\n
That move did not quite work out and Dzeko soon found himself out of favour at the club, having failed to score in 11 Serie A games.<\/p>\n
But a switch to Schalke in Bundesliga 2 in January has reinvigorated him – possibly at just the right time as the World Cup approaches – and he has scored six goals in eight games for the German side.<\/p>\n
On what the future holds for him, Dzeko said recently: “I’ll listen to my body in the summer but at the moment, I still feel very good, and I still score goals.”<\/p>\n
But if he does help his country qualify for the World Cup, it is very likely that conversation with his body will be delayed a little longer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Dzeko has been a crucial player for his country since his international debut in 2007, and has 73…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":497704,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[218,101,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-497703","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-football","tag-football","tag-sports","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/497703","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=497703"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/497703\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/497704"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=497703"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=497703"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=497703"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}