Thirty-One Nil

by James Montague

  **

  The Palestinian and Afghan teams walk out of their oppressive tunnel and on to the pitch as FIFA’s insipid attempt at a national anthem plays. The heat is incredible. FIFA insists that the match takes place at 5 p.m., but the stadium, a gift from the aluminium factory that keeps the city alive, is a large bowl with a running track around it. There is no shade from the 100 degrees-plus heat. A small crowd of a few thousand noisily cheer on their Afghan neighbours.

  Within thirty seconds it becomes clear that the Afghans are much better than the Palestinians had given them credit for. Israfeel appears to be running the show for Afghanistan in midfield until Murad Alyan – a striker who, unlike many of his colleagues in the professional West Bank Premier League, works in a local hospital – scores for the Palestinians with a glancing header.

  Ahmed Keshkesh has a miserable half. Back in the dressing room at half-time, Moussa is screaming at him in English to follow his instructions. But he ignores him, walks up to the white board that Moussa has been swiping at violently with a blue marker and tells his coach where he thinks he should be going instead, an almost suicidal moment of bravado. Moussa is stunned. He doesn’t pull Keshkesh out of the game straight away: instead he is substituted within a few minutes of the start of the second half. He doesn’t know it yet but it is the last World Cup match he will play while coach Moussa is in charge.

  The Afghans press in the second half, and have their chances to equalise, but Keshkesh’s replacement, Ismail Amour, somehow fires a rocket of a shot from an impossible angle into the top left-hand corner. The strike is so good, and so out of character for Amour – a talented but wasteful winger – that the bench do not celebrate until thirty seconds after he has scored, when they realise the ball is now back in the centre circle. It is one of the finest goals a player could possibly score, but it isn’t caught on film. No camera records it. It is lost for ever, a memory only for the few who witness it.

  The referee blows his whistle. Palestine has won its first 2014 World Cup qualification match 2-0. The players hug and dance around the pitch celebrating as if they have already qualified. Moussa is livid. He runs on to the pitch pulling down the players’ arms. ‘We are not through, stop this,’ he shouts, trying to apply a sense of perspective, fearing the response from the opposition that arrogance can bring. Israfeel and his Afghan team trudge back to the dressing room, sweat-soaked and shattered. No one knows if this is the last we will see of the Afghan national team.

  **

  Chelyabinsk, Russian Federation

  The Palestinian team leave that night. It is a long flight home, first to Dubai, then Amman, before a bus through the Jordan valley to the Israeli border. But Stéphane and I aren’t there to witness it. Instead we are sent on a more circuitous route, flying to Chelyabinsk – a city in Russia near the Kazakh border that I haven’t previously heard of, but which will later become infamous when a superbolide meteor explodes above it in 2013. From there we fly to Moscow and then to Amman, before taking a taxi for the short journey overland to the Israeli-controlled Palestinian border.

  We land in Chelyabinsk in the early morning sun and approach the border in a grand, high-ceilinged arrivals hall. A collection of border guards in Soviet-style military hats stand and stare. We tell them we are journalists and hand over our passports. Stéphane once had a Russian girlfriend and speaks a little Russian. The border guards’ mouths drop open. Two journalists, one British, one a black Frenchman speaking Russian, at the border of a provincial Russian city wanting to pass. Their minds are suitably boggled.

  A file is produced. It is a thick blue binder with more documents than it was designed to hold. Three guards flick through, page by page, until they find a reason not to let us in. The tallest explains to Stéphane that they won’t let us in because we don’t have a transit visa, even though we are not staying. Worse, we are being deported back to Tajikistan, where we will almost certainly be jailed. They lock us in a room with three beds and no toilet alongside a mute Tajik teenager who has no baggage, scars on his face and toes and who has tried to enter Russia on a false passport.

  Seven hours pass. Occasionally we are let out to use the toilet, but only when we bang on the door hard enough and scream for attention, and only between incoming flights. The mute Tajik teenager, his clothes dirty and torn, collapses on to the bed and falls into a deep sleep, as if it is the first mattress he has seen in years. Eventually we are taken to a man sitting at a desk. We have to pay money, he says. It isn’t a bribe. Here, look, I have paperwork for you to sign, he says. It is definitely not a bribe. We pay the man sixty euros, sign a form in Russian and are escorted to a plane bound for Armenia, then Dubai, then Amman. We arrive in Amman forty-eight hours before the game.

  **

  Amman, Jordan

  Despite the best efforts of the Afghan government, the Afghanistan national football team arrives in Amman, this time via Delhi and Dubai, twenty-four hours after us and just one day before the match. Stéphane and I wait for them at Queen Alia airport. The players file on to the waiting bus, shattered. It is four days since their defeat in Tajikistan and the team has not trained since. Those who haven’t slept stretch out on the floor of the bus as it speeds west towards the Israeli border between Jordan and the West Bank. It is Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath, and the border closes early in a few hours’ time. If it closes with the Afghans on the Jordanian side then the match is finished.

  Mohammad Yusef Mashriqi stays awake as the bus descends into the Jordan valley and towards the Israeli border. Like Omar Jarun, Mohammad is an American citizen, a New Yorker who used to play for the US national youth team and, he says, has a contract with the New York Cosmos. He brings up a picture on his phone: him, arm in arm with the club’s new Director of Soccer, Eric Cantona. He had never been to Afghanistan until after the game in Tajikistan.

  ‘I went to Kabul for the first time ever, it was so exciting,’ he says. ‘You know, my family are from Kandahar. My family didn’t want me to enter Afghanistan, but they agreed in the end.’

  His parents had good reason to worry. The family fled Afghanistan in 1985, before Mohammad was born, six years after the Soviets invaded. They had always been a football-crazy family – his father Tahrir used to play for the Afghanistan national team back in the 1970s and his grandfather was heavily involved in the game while a high school principal. ‘My grandfather was very big in football in Kandahar, but the communists took him,’ he explains. ‘He was handed in by someone working with the communists. He was never heard from again. No one knows what happened to him.’ Like Omar, he too dreamed of representing Team USA, and played for some of the same youth teams as Freddy Adu and Michael Bradley. But after 9/11, all that changed. ‘After the 9/11 attacks I was never called back to the US national team, that was what bothered me the most,’ he says with a hint of bitterness. ‘Now I’m filling my father’s shoes. I just wish we could play against the States in four or five years’ time.’

  The Afghanistan team has relied equally on a mixture of players from its diaspora and its home-grown talent, so much so that many of the team are unable to speak to each other. ‘Afghanistan has thirty-two languages, but the two [main] languages are Pashtun or Farsi. I only understand Pashtun,’ admits Djelaludin Sharityar, a thoughtful twenty-eight-year-old defender with long hair and a big black beard. He is for some unknown reason called ‘Toto’ by his team-mates and talks with a German accent, his family having fled there when he was seven years old. ‘Sometimes it is a problem in the game to explain something ... but we find a way to explain to everyone what they want. The first game was a big problem, I went for the ball and shouted “my ball!”. He didn’t understand so we both went for it. Now I know some Farsi words to tell him.’

  The bus reaches the border, and crosses over the River Jordan, more a trickle of sludge than the biblical torrent of yore. The players crowd by the windows, excitedly taking pictures of the first Star of David flag they see fluttering nearby. ‘Will we get
stamp, from Israel?’ one of the players asks me. Three of his team-mates nod with concern.

  No, I tell him. It has all been arranged beforehand. Don’t worry. The Israelis won’t stamp your passport.

  ‘No,’ he repeats slowly, as if I am not understanding him correctly. ‘Can we get a stamp from Israel?’

  His three team-mates nod again, their faces eager; hopeful rather than concerned.

  ‘We want a stamp from Israel,’ he smiles, obviously aware that nine members of the Afghan national team disappeared in 2004 when they travelled to Italy for a charity match. ‘We don’t want to go back to Kabul.’

  The Allenby Bridge crossing terminal is a hateful place. The building is innocuously designed, like a 1970s Duty Free supermarket, but is seething with resentment. Israeli teenagers carrying machine guns patrol close by as hundreds of Palestinian men, women and children wait in line. The Afghan squad stand in the holding area, watching the daily chaos unfold around them: children running around, arguments, shouting, anger. Sitting down on one of the metal benches is Toto. He looks dazed. This wasn’t what he was expecting. ‘This ... this is unbelievable,’ he stutters. He is sitting in front of a long line of covered women, some of whom hopefully hold up American passports that will make no difference. ‘They are being treated like cattle. Just to get into their own country.’ He doesn’t say another word for the rest of the journey. The squad is eventually led through to another room and processed out of sight from the Palestinians. Each Afghan team member passes through without trouble, even the four players who don’t want to go back to Kabul. They ask for, but they don’t get, their Israeli stamps.

  **

  Al Ram, Ramallah, West Bank

  The Faisal al-Husseini Stadium is small, but it is home. Busloads of fans from all across the West Bank arrive two hours before kick-off, driving past the West Bank separation barrier that runs a hundred metres from the stadium’s entrance. Banks of riot police clad in body armour and helmets, some carrying machine guns, prepare for the biggest match in Palestine’s history. Its significance goes far beyond the football pitch. For the past two years the Palestinian Authority has been busy building the basics for an independent state: a strong economy, an honest, incorruptible civil service, a security force that can match any internal strife it may face, especially a football match. But part of this strategy involves sport, and especially football.

  The man in charge of the Palestinian Football Association is Jibril Rajoub, one of the most powerful men in the West Bank. As a young radical he spent seventeen years in an Israeli prison for throwing a grenade at an army checkpoint. While in prison he learned to speak fluent Hebrew and, after his release, later rejected violence as a means of achieving Palestinian statehood. He rose to become Yasser Arafat’s feared West Bank national security adviser and was one of the highest ranking members of Fatah. For him, the national football team is another way of showing the world that the Palestinians can take care of their own business. ‘In 2006 we had no football, no competitions, nothing; now there has been a revolution in Palestine. This has a political dimension and I think having a home pitch recognised by FIFA is proof that statehood is possible. I do believe that sport can help this,’ he tells me that morning, in the café of Ramallah’s sole five-star hotel. He is an imposing presence, with a wide back, barrel chest, bald head and a moustache. He speaks in a low, gravelly voice. He is now a man of peace, he says, but he is not someone you would want to get on the wrong side of. ‘I think this match is a clear-cut message to the international community that Palestine is capable, putting it on the map of sport for the first time,’ he says. ‘We will have our first ever World Cup qualification on Palestinian territory, under Palestinian Authority protection by Palestinian police. The whole participation will be ours, blood and flesh. It is history.’

  Rajoub’s portrait hangs high in the Faisal al-Husseini Stadium, next to pictures of Yasser Arafat with the golden Dome of the Rock – Jerusalem’s iconic shrine built on the site of Judaism’s Second Temple that is considered the third holiest site in Islam – in the background. Next to them are pictures of the Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas and Sepp Blatter, whose decision to allow Palestine to join FIFA will arguably be the greatest legacy of his career. Fans stream into the stands, paying their five shekels for a ticket. Hundreds of members of the press from all around the world are here, too, to watch history being made. In the Palestinian dressing room the pressure returns. The players are silent. Ahmed Keshkesh is nowhere to be seen. On discovering he was to start on the bench, he stormed out of the team’s hotel and hasn’t been seen since. The players sit with their backs to the wall while the team’s three goalkeepers lay their training bibs on the floor and pray together. Coach Moussa again quietly paces around the room, now in shirt, tie and jacket. Finally it is game time. The team, the squad and the coaches meet Moussa in the middle of the room. They link arms in a big circle and begin to pray. This time, unlike before the first leg, the team kiss each other before going out into the tunnel. Moussa greets each and wishes them luck in their own language. He gets to Roberto Bishara. They hold each other, unable to communicate in a common language. They nod, acknowledging the awkwardness, and go in their separate directions.

  The two teams line up in the tunnel. Omar stands in the middle, a full head above his team-mates, exhorting them in American English to ‘talk to each other’, although nobody does. The twenty-two men walk out into the baking sunlight to a scrum of photographers and TV cameras. More than fifty journalists are here from Israel alone. The match is even being shown live on Israel’s Channel 5. In the stands Jibril Rajoub is watching, as is the prime minister Salam Fayyad, as they line up for the national anthems, both of which sound as if they have been written in seventeenth-century France. There are no tears of emotion.

  The raucous 10,000-strong crowd roar on the Palestinians. It is a scrappy game at first, as if the weight of expectation is affecting the team’s performance. But the Afghans seem sapped of all energy. Inevitably Palestine take the lead when Hussam Wadi shoots from forty yards out and somehow finds the back of the net. The Afghan goalkeeper curses himself, but it doesn’t lead to an avalanche largely thanks to luck. The Palestinians hit the post three times and when Afghanistan equalise there’s brief hope of an upset. But everyone is drained. The heat, the travel, the pressure, the dignitaries, all of it means that, by the end, the teams can barely kick the ball. It takes a few moments for the players and the crowd to realise that the referee has blown the final whistle. Two Afghan players collapse and are taken to hospital with exhaustion. There is barely any celebration as the Palestinians return to the tunnel. Salam Fayyad enters the silent dressing room and softly whispers words of encouragement into each player’s ear, but he senses that the mood doesn’t call for it. The Palestinians stay silent, as if the victors in an attritional war. But victors none the less.

  **

  Less than a month later, the two-match tie against Thailand has everything the Palestinians have become accustomed to: defeat, fatigue, hope and, ultimately, failure. The first game in Bangkok sees the Thais take a slender 1-0 lead to the West Bank. They are the favourites after all. But the return match is a different proposition and the slim lead makes little difference to the Palestinians. Either way, they need to score a goal. Which is what they do. The Palestinians level the tie early on with a brilliant move started and finished by Murad Alyan, the part-time striker who works as a lab assistant in a West Bank hospital. He initiates a one-two that pings quickly between three players before he himself fires into the bottom right-hand corner from outside the penalty box. The Thais score soon after, securing a crucial away goal, meaning Palestine need to score twice. Fifty-six minutes pass without any more goals. As the game enters its final few minutes the Palestinians pour forward, seemingly to no avail. But then, in the ninetieth minute, Alyan scores his second of the game, finding himself on the ball on the right-hand side of the penalty box. He somehow outmuscles and b
amboozles five Thai players around him and fires low and hard across the goalkeeper into the far corner of the net. The Palestinians have four minutes to save their World Cup. They charge deep into injury time, but the Thais break away and when their striker is hacked down from behind by Ahmed Harbi, who receives a red card, the Palestine team are reduced to ten men. Datsakorn Thonglao scores from the free-kick with virtually the last kick of the game. It ends 2-2 and Palestine is eliminated.

  It is a sad end for the Palestinians, and for coach Moussa, too. He will later be sacked for his brave but ultimately unsuccessful campaign. Not a single team that began in the first round of Asian qualification makes it to group stage. Nor do some of Asia’s so-called sleeping giants. India, with its population of a billion people, is swept aside by the United Arab Emirates, with its population of nine million. Palestine’s neighbour Jordan destroys Nepal 9-0 in one match. China scores thirteen goals over two games against Laos. Oman are awarded a place in the next round after riots in Myanmar call a halt to their second match. But one unlikely team does make it through to the final round.

  Syria handsomely defeat Tajikistan over two games. The Syrian team had also travelled to the Metellurg Stadium in Tursunzode and won 4-0. Civil war is raging in their homeland but they have the best generation of players in their history and have a strong chance of qualifying for Brazil. The Assad regime in Syria prepares to welcome a rare good news story of unity in the face of war with open arms. But it doesn’t happen. Syria are disqualified from World Cup qualification for fielding an ineligible player, George Murad, who once played thirteen minutes in a meaningless friendly for Sweden. Instead, Tajikistan take their place. By the end of July 2011, a full three years before Brazil, the chance of reaching the World Cup finals is over for almost 30 per cent of the world’s population.

  **

  Tulkarem, West Bank. Fourth of July 2011