Thirty-One Nil

by James Montague

  Zreik wasn’t too concerned about the wider social or political benefits that a united and successful Lebanese national team might have on the country. For him it was about escaping, getting to Europe and playing in the best leagues in the world. The best way for that to happen, he reasons, was to get to Brazil. ‘The World Cup is very good for the players,’ he says. ‘If the players go [to Brazil] they get to play in the Emirates and other leagues. It is very good for the Lebanese player. Playing the next round [of World Cup qualification] means lots of people come and see you. It will give our players a very good chance to move abroad.’ First there was a final training session with the national team and then a friendly with Qatar in Doha en route to Abu Dhabi. ‘That was my dream when I was ten years old, you watch the World Cup and dream to play in the World Cup,’ he says, even if the money, the rewards and the potential route out of Lebanon towards the glittering lights of European football were a more powerful motivator. ‘This is the first time we have any professional football. Any player can play here and make a lot of money,’ he says. But they might not stay for long. ‘If you go to the World Cup,’ he says, the light now fading and the cold becoming unbearable, ‘I don’t think any national team player will stay in Lebanon.’

  The next day Zreik joins Bucker and the rest of the Lebanese squad to prepare. Even defeat against the UAE wouldn’t be a disaster if other results went their way. Kuwait would have to beat South Korea in Seoul, a highly unlikely outcome. Still, Bucker, Zreik and the rest of the team are taking no chances. They talk of beating the UAE, and possibly topping their group, which would give them a much more favourable draw in the next round. If they are to beat the UAE, they will have to do it without a warm-up match. Overnight, the Qataris pull out of their scheduled friendly, a commonplace occurrence when you are at the bottom of the international game. The players arrive at the Safa club stadium in Beirut in low, blinding sunshine, the cold and mud of the previous day’s game in Tripoli a distant memory. Bucker screams instructions to his players as he runs them through their paces. When training is finished he gathers the players to the dugout, banishes the two other journalists who had come to watch the session from the pitch and gives his last pep talk on Lebanese soil. But his loud Germanic bark can still be clearly heard from the car park, echoing around the empty stands. ‘YOU are the IDEAL for Lebanon and Lebanese football,’ he shouts. ‘THINK: if you can’t respect each other, how will other people here respect YOU?’

  **

  Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. February 2012.

  Abu Dhabi is coloured red, white and green but not, as it usually is on an international fixture, with the colour of the Emirati flag. It is the day of the UAE v Lebanon World Cup qualifier and the streets outside the capital’s Al-Nahyan Stadium are filled with Lebanese fans of every religious and political persuasion. Everyone, it seems, is holding or wearing a Lebanese flag. Female volunteers are even stationed on the pavements to paint the Lebanese flag on to the faces of supporters. There are as many as 100,000 Lebanese expats in the UAE and 350,000 across the Persian Gulf. The civil war has spread its sons and daughters far and wide. One estimate suggests as many as fourteen million Lebanese have settled abroad, the vast majority of them in Brazil. ‘It’s an amazing feeling when we are all together supporting our team,’ explains Ahmed and his wife, Roula, Lebanese expats from Abu Dhabi, as they take in the patriotic scene. Around them thousands more file into the stadium. Nearby, one man is struggling to hold a full-sized, and full-weight, replica of the World Cup which he had himself cast out of metal. ‘If we qualify to the mondial, to the World Cup, it will be in Brazil so there are eight million Lebanese living in Brazil. We will fill all the stadiums there!’ The turnout for the game was incredible but it also proved to be another example, after the South Korea game, of just how much the political classes in Lebanon had failed to engender any real and lasting feeling of identity beyond narrow religious sects. ‘They [the politicians] have to learn from this otherwise it is no use,’ Ahmed says. ‘They have to learn that we are Lebanese. We are not religious. There is only one Lebanese flag.’ Hundreds more surge past in a blur of red and white. ‘We are all the same. We are one hand. In all circumstances,’ Roula adds, before they too join the crowd.

  It wasn’t just Lebanon’s expat community who had filled the stands. Nearby, Lebanon’s team hotel is being deluged by fans and dignitaries, also draped in red, white and green, waiting to have their pictures taken with the team. Several politicians from the rival anti-Syrian March 14 and pro-Syrian March 8 factions are here, too, eager to show their support for the team and distance themselves from the sectarian backbiting that has brought the country to the brink of war so often. One politician in particular has good reason to resent being in the same room as the opposition. At twenty-nine, Nadim Gemayel is the youngest MP in the Lebanese parliament, but his name is tightly entwined with the past. He is the spitting image of his father, Bachir, who was briefly Lebanon’s president elect. Under Lebanon’s confessional political system, the position of president is always allocated to the Christians, the prime minister to the Sunnis, the speaker of the parliament to the Shia, and so on. But in 1982 Lebanon was under occupation by both Syria and Israel and in the grip of anarchy. Before Bachir could be sworn in he was assassinated when a bomb exploded at his Phalange party headquarters. Nadim was four months old. Among many Christians in Lebanon Bachir is still revered. During the 2009 parliamentary elections I walked through the streets of one Christian district as the results were announced. Street hawkers were selling T-shirts and pin badges, not with any of the current generation of political figures on them, but with a black and white, pop art profile of Bachir – handsome and young – taken a few months before he was killed at the age of thirty-four.

  ‘We are all gathered, we are all united under our flag. This is a success for our team, a success for our country and not any one sectarian group,’ Nadim says as we wait in the hotel lobby for a glimpse of the team. The national team offered both groups the chance to be on the same side for a change. I ask him about Ahmed and Roula, the supporters I had met outside, and the fans I had spoken to at the dreary 0-0 draw between Tripoli and Al-Ahed a few days before. They had all told me the same thing. The politicians should learn from the team, from the players and, in particular, from Theo Bucker. ‘Yes, maybe, I think that’s a good point. It is something that as politicians we have to take into consideration,’ he agrees. ‘We have to emphasise in another way to bring this into politics. This team went through all the sectarian complications and now they are here united all together holding the Lebanese flag.’ He pointed to a smaller group of men in dark suits, the majority of whom wore large beards. ‘There is a lot of members of parliament, from [the Shia political party] Amal, from March 14 and March 8, six or seven deputies. We are all united today to support our Lebanese team, this is clear.’

  With two hours to go before kick-off, the members of the team emerge one by one into the packed lobby. They push through the fans, politicians and businessmen – both Christians and Muslims – as they congratulate them, ruffle their hair and place scarves with the Lebanese flag around their shoulders. Bucker emerges last – congratulated by everybody within arm’s length of him – wide-eyed as if arriving at his own surprise birthday party.

  **

  Abu Dhabi’s Al-Nahyan Stadium is a microcosm of the host’s ambition, and also of its demographic reality. It is named after the Abu Dhabi royal family that also rules the country’s seven emirates. Twenty-foot-high colour portraits of the founder of the modern UAE, Sheikh Zayed, and the country’s current president, Sheikh Khalifa, have been raised over the stands. Sheikh Mansour, the man who bought and transformed Manchester City, is a member of the Al-Nahyan family, too, brother of the president no less. Yet the stadium is small, reflecting the tiny crowds that most UAE league matches attract, and is attached to a luxury mall and a five-star hotel. The stadium is bereft of Emirati supporters; just a handful are here, wearing t
heir traditional white national dress, the dishdasha. While one half is empty, the other is crammed with 10,000 Lebanese. Every Lebanese player holds his hand to his heart as the national anthem reverberates around the stadium.

  Bucker’s one selection headache is who to play in goal. Safa goalkeeper Ziad al-Samad had been first choice, but had suffered constant criticism in the press for his lack of height and his excess weight. Even though he had let no one down in qualification, Bucker replaces him with Abbas Hassan, a former Under 21 Swedish international who plays for IFK Norrköping in the Swedish first division. He is tall, handsome, slender and confident. He acts and looks like a good goalkeeper. Within twenty minutes, however, Hassan is picking the ball out of his net after an awful error. When the UAE captain Basheer Saeed floats a fairly tame free-kick over the wall, Hassan somehow manages to palm the ball into his own net. The crowd shrieks. His team-mates hold their heads in their hands. Hassan lies for what feels like an hour face down on the grass. Luckily, Mahmoud El Ali, the Al-Ahed striker who has been singled out by his club coach as the star to watch, bursts through and equalises before half-time. The bad news is that the Emirati goalkeeper hits him with such force that he ruptures a cruciate ligament, is stretchered off the pitch and out of the game for six months. It will turn out to be El Ali’s last ever Lebanese national team goal, but not because of the injury he sustained.

  Ahmad Zreik plays his part, too. With the UAE 2-1 up, it is his pace that finds the space for him to cross for another Al-Ahed team-mate, Hassan Maatouk, to equalise. Both of Lebanon’s goals have been scored and made by players trained on pitches allegedly paid for by Hezbollah. The second half goes badly for Lebanon. They concede twice but, with South Korea scoring late on against Kuwait, it doesn’t matter. When the referee blows the final whistle the team know they have made it to the final round of World Cup qualification for the first time in their history even after losing 4-2. The dream of reaching Brazil – thanks to the number of expatriates living there virtually a home tournament if they can somehow qualify – is still alive. Yet the team look devastated as they leave the pitch. By the full-time whistle most of the Lebanese fans have left. Those who stayed are booing the goalkeeper Abbas Hassan loudly as he walks past.

  Lebanon reaching the fourth and final round was perhaps the only shock in 2014 Asian World Cup qualification. Iraq, like the Lebanese, had also managed to construct a successful multi-confessional team that had thrived. The Brazilian legend Zico was now in charge of a team that had some experience of victory. The Lions of Mesopotamia famously won the 2007 Asian Cup, the Asian equivalent of the Copa America or European Championships, when the country was in the darkest days of its civil war. Tens of thousands took to the streets of Baghdad to celebrate a victory for a team comprised of Sunni, Shia, Kurd and Turkmen. Hundreds of celebrating fans lost their lives as insurgents targeted anything and anyone who celebrated unity rather than sectarian division. Now, though, Zico had taken Iraq into the next round, hoping to emulate the 1986 team that made it to Mexico, although not the circumstances that surrounded that success. It would later emerge that the 1986 team had been terrorised by Uday Hussein, Saddam’s sadistic eldest son, who controlled the team and the federation by fear, torturing players who underperformed or ‘embarrassed’ him. Unfancied Jordan had joined them in the next round at the expense of China, another billion people who wouldn’t see their country at the finals. All the usual suspects eased through: Japan, Australia, Korea and Iran. Qatar, who had been awarded the right to host the 2022 World Cup before qualification began, had also made it. But only just.

  Former England coach Peter Taylor had taken charge of the Bahrain national team in the aftermath of a revolution in the tiny Persian Gulf kingdom. With a population of just 1.3 million, Bahrain had come within a goal of becoming the smallest nation ever to qualify for the World Cup finals when they lost to New Zealand in an inter-continental playoff in the run-up to South Africa 2010. But, in 2011, the Arab world rose up in a series of pro-democracy and freedom protests. The Arab Spring had toppled Hosni Mubarak in Egypt and brought down the presidents of Yemen, Tunisia and, of course, seen Colonel Gaddafi lynched in Libya. In Bahrain the majority Shia population rose against the minority Sunni monarchy, but the protests were crushed. Among the protesters were several leading sportsmen and women, including key players in the national team: brothers A’ala and Mohamed Hubail and Sayed Mohamed Adnan, the cultured midfielder who missed a crucial penalty in Wellington when the match against New Zealand was still 0-0. The Bahraini authorities punished them for the insubordination. They were arrested and jailed. The Hubail brothers later alleged torture and they were banned from ever again playing for the national team. When interviewed by ESPN’s investigative programme E:60, Peter Taylor seemed to have no idea who these players were. ‘I knew nothing of the politics of the situation. I was just a coach, in charge of the football team. That was it,’ he would later tell me on the phone, pleading his innocence, when he was back in the UK.

  Even without Bahrain’s key players – even if he didn’t know he was actually missing his key players in the first place – Taylor had managed to keep the team’s interest in World Cup qualification alive until the last group game. The problem was that to progress he needed Iran to beat Qatar in Tehran, and for Bahrain to beat Indonesia by nine goals. The game in Indonesia, despite the country having a population of 238 million people with an almost religious devotion to English football, was in chaos. Endemic corruption and an unsanctioned breakaway league had meant that the majority of seasoned Indonesian internationals were not picked. They had lost every game in qualification and the Bahrain match did not start well when their goalkeeper was sent off after three minutes. The referee awarded four penalties, two of which were saved, and Bahrain went on to win 10-0. Bahrain would have made it, too, if it hadn’t been for an eighty-fourth-minute Qatari equaliser in front of 90,000 fans at Iran’s Azadi Stadium. That game finished 2-2 but the result in Manama was so suspicious that FIFA launched an investigation immediately after the match. ‘We did nothing wrong,’ Taylor pleaded after the game. ‘There is no need for us to speak to FIFA. At the end of the day, the game was played and we did as well as we possibly could and played the strongest team we could.’ Taylor seemed to be completely oblivious to the fact that match fixing might have taken place, especially during a World Cup qualifier. His competitive nature was disarmingly honest, too. ‘We should have won by more than ten,’ he added. ‘We missed two penalties.’

  Match fixing and corruption couldn’t have been further from Theo Bucker’s mind as he sat in the dugout of Al-Nahyan Stadium in Abu Dhabi watching his dejected players trudge off the pitch. They had qualified but it didn’t taste like victory. Bucker was livid. ‘We were not focused and were scared, we scored OWN GOALS!’ he shouts incredulously as we both sat on the bench. His eyes were focused, not on me, but disapprovingly on his players. ‘This was the aim we had from the beginning and when we started talking about this out loud people were laughing at us,’ he says of the team’s progress, for the first time showing a little happiness about Lebanon’s historic qualification to the next round. ‘Then we started to play good matches and win matches. We have to calculate that sometimes our progress is going in waves, up and down. But we have to recognise the trend. The crowd is one of the points I was counting on, it was an atmosphere like at home. Which is why I couldn’t understand.’ Bucker looked confused at first, then suspicious, as he tried to figure out how his plan could have failed. ‘In the first half our players were too afraid,’ he finally concludes. ‘But we will go to Malaysia and see what the draw is like. And we will start again.’ Certainly no one was laughing at Lebanon any more. The 4-2 defeat may have dampened expectations somewhat but, as Bucker points out before heading off to meet the Emirati press, it is still significant. In a country slowly being destabilised by the uprising in Syria, Lebanon could use any glue it can get its hands on.

  Bucker travelled to Malaysia for the Asian Foo
tball Confederation’s final 2014 World Cup qualification draw and saw his Lebanese team placed in a tough group with South Korea, Qatar, Uzbekistan and Iran. As with most of the campaign, indeed as with most of Lebanon’s history, fate has not been kind. Their final match will be sixteen months from now – against Iran, in Tehran.

  6

  EGYPT, MOZAMBIQUE

  Cairo, Egypt. February 2012.

  Smoke still hangs over the bedraggled custodians of Tahrir Square. The haze has been here for months, a blend of smoke from the fires lit to burn rubbish and keep people warm at night, the stoves used to heat food and coffee for the merchants who do business here and, occasionally, the tear gas and fireworks that follow the periodic confrontations with the authorities. Flags are flying along the steel barriers between the street and the pavement; of Egypt, Palestine, Libya, Tunisia, and of the Free Syrian Army. The 25 January revolution is little over a year old now. The former president Hosni Mubarak, the dictator who had ruled Egypt with an iron fist for three decades, has gone, replaced by an army council and the promise of free and fair elections. A million people stood here, demanding their freedom, fighting the police. They celebrated in similar numbers when Mubarak stepped down, was arrested and then thrown into a Red Sea jail. His forced departure was watched by a mesmerised world. The Arab Spring had claimed Tunisia’s president, seen Colonel Gaddafi lynched in the streets and, now, sent Mubarak to jail. But for those who still clung to Midan Tahrir, Freedom Square in English, a new Egypt is just a promise. A ragged crew of activists, refuseniks, street kids and hawkers belligerently remain. ‘Revolutions have never lightened the burden of tyranny,’ George Bernard Shaw wrote. ‘They have only shifted it to another shoulder.’