It has been a long time since the Lebanese national team has tasted any victory at all, let alone inspired the affections and song-writing talents of the country’s famously beautiful people. For five years instability, assassinations and lingering sectarian squabbling have seen matches in Lebanon’s domestic league played behind closed doors. The government feared that clashes between groups of supporters aligned to different religious groups might spark a new civil war. The national team, too – made up of Shia, Sunni, Orthodox Christian, Armenian, Maronite Catholic and Druze players – couldn’t lift the weight of Lebanon’s history, nor rise above the hatreds. By the time the 2014 World Cup qualification campaign had come around, the Cedars – named after the national trees that still periodically cover the slopes of Mount Lebanon – were one of the lowest ranked teams in the world. When Lebanon qualified for the first group stage after beating lowly Bangladesh 4-2 on aggregate – the same stage that saw Thailand just squeeze past Palestine – Lebanon were the lowest ranked Asian team left in contention.
Bucker had been in charge of the Lebanese national team before and had recently won the Lebanese title with Al-Ahed – a team that enjoys strong support from Hezbollah – but answered the call when his adoptive country came to him again. After a 6-0 mauling against South Korea in the first game, things didn’t look good. But then something strange happened. They started winning. And then came that victory, the victory which was now inspiring a song being played to him in his hotel suite: a 2-1 home win against 2002 World Cup semi-finalists South Korea in the return fixture. The victory took place in front of 60,000 fans at the Camille Chamoun Sports City Stadium after the government decided that the fans could return to watch football, for free. The stadium was a few hundred metres from the Shatila and Sabra Palestinian refugee camps, site of the 1982 massacre where as many as 3,000 men, women and children were butchered by a Lebanese Christian militia as Israeli forces looked on. The Camille Chamoun Stadium had itself become a refugee camp during the worst years of the civil war. The former head of the Lebanese Football Association would hang a photograph behind his desk to remind him of darker times; of the pitch, then just mud and gravel, covered in shredded pieces of fabric that had been fashioned into tents.
The stadium had now been restored to its former glory and the South Korea game gave Lebanon hope of reaching the World Cup finals for the first time in its history. With it came a rare outburst of national pride. The national flag – the red and white horizontal stripes with the green cedar at its centre – had been flown in the stands, rather than the yellow standard of Hezbollah or the white of the Christian Lebanese Forces. And that, it seems, was largely down to Bucker. ‘Since I met my wife I see myself as half-Lebanese,’ Bucker says loudly and theatrically, once the singer and her producer have gone to get a drink. ‘Lebanon football before I arrived wasn’t under the carpet. It was buried deeply under the ground. It was not existing at all.’ He is sixty years old with a thin face and a mop of reddish-blond hair. He speaks English with a heavy, rolling German accent, shouting every other word to accentuate the important points. Bucker was right, of course. Football was almost dead in Lebanon before he arrived. The league mirrored the sectarian divisions that had led Lebanon towards civil war in the first place. Each club had a distinct religious identity entrenched by the patronage of politicians who would help fund them. Teams like Ansar and Nejmeh would be supported by the Sunni Hariri family, first by Rafic Hariri and then, after his death, by his son Saad, who would also become prime minister; Safa were supported by the Druze; Racing Beirut were aligned with the Orthodox Christians. And then there was Al-Ahed, who had won three of the four last championships and had strong links with Shia guerrilla group Hezbollah. Al-Ahed’s shirts were even sponsored by Al-Manar, Hezbollah’s very own TV network which is itself considered a terrorist entity in the US. In those circumstances a five-year spectator ban was probably inevitable. ‘The Lebanese are tired of all the problems of the past,’ Bucker says dismissively when I ask about his own time as coach of Al-Ahed. The team provided most of the players for the national team, eight from the last squad. But Bucker doesn’t want to talk about Al-Ahed, or Hezbollah, or the divisions of the past, only the national team and how it is transforming the capital before his eyes. ‘The Lebanese people are happy that this team is uniting them,’ he says. ‘Now they have a very good reason to come back to the stadium. I believe it is very good for the nation. They have found something which is really uniting them. There’s a deep love for football in the country. But before they had no home to dedicate their love. Now they have a home, now they can support their own team.’
Bucker had played in Germany for Borussia Dortmund and FC Schalke 04 before ending his career in Saudi Arabia. In 1985 he began coaching in the Arab world, a journey that would take him everywhere from the huge crowds and passion of Egypt to Libya, where the Gaddafi family ruled football with an iron fist. That journey first brought Bucker to Beirut in 2000 during the high point of Lebanese football when the country hosted the Asian Cup and built a host of brand new stadiums across the country. It had been a decade since the end of the civil war but the Lebanese economy was booming thanks largely to Rafic Hariri, a billionaire tycoon who had made his money in Saudi Arabia’s construction industry. Lebanon had not performed well at the finals, but hosting an event so soon after the civil war was an important marker for the country’s reconstruction. Bucker was returning under very different circumstances, at a time when religious and political differences were sharper than ever, and vowed to lead by example. ‘All the Lebanese players are not stupid, they understand,’ he says gruffly. ‘You select players in the fair way, not because my father, my brother, know somebody, not because they are Christian or Druze or Shia. I don’t care if someone is a Christian or a Muslim. There is no old or young. There are only good and bad football players. I tried to make them faceless, without any number.’
Unsurprisingly, Bucker’s sectarian-blind approach to team selection led to a dramatic rise in form. After doing the bare minimum and scraping through against Bangladesh, and then the 6-0 loss to South Korea, Lebanon recovered, beating the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait before that famous victory against the Koreans in Beirut in the last game. All Bucker needs now is a point in their final game against the United Arab Emirates in Abu Dhabi and they will be through to the final group stage of Asian qualification for the first time in their history. ‘To beat them and beat them with good football? Well,’ Bucker says with pride of the South Korea game. ‘It wasn’t luck. We deserved to win. We were equal in every way.’ This was down to his own football philosophy, he explains, one which, if every club just listened to him without question, would bear immediate fruit. For starters he has dispensed with formations and positions. He believes only in attack and defence. ‘I made the job very easy,’ he says. ‘I need around me a president and manager able to grow a kind of disciplined system. And if they work with this system, I GUARANTEE,’ he shouts, ‘I GUARANTEE I will get immediate success. One hundred per cent. But the PROBLEM,’ he shouts again, ‘in the Arabic world is that when someone is UP, he is drowning. As soon as his head is out of the water he is speaking like he is the founder of football. Now people are really learning.’
For Bucker football is a simple game. You eat well, you sleep well and everyone – from the kitman to the federation president – does exactly what he, Bucker, tells you to do. With his Lebanese wife by his side at every match, Bucker has been building a team representative of the nation, even if he has largely called on Al-Ahed, the most controversial team in the league, for most of his players. The likes of winger Ahmad Zreik, who he persuaded to give up working in a restaurant in the United States to return home and play for Lebanon, and Mahmoud El Ali, who had ably led Lebanon’s attack during qualification and had been the best player on the pitch against South Korea, were transported from Al-Ahed straight into the national team.
Al-Ahed is a fascinating club. Their stadium is to be found deep
in Dahiyeh, the Hezbollah stronghold in southern Beirut which was heavily bombed by Israeli jets during the Second Lebanese War in 2006. During one visit to Al-Ahed’s ground in 2007 I had spoken to several leading figures at the club. Outside the main office a picture of Al-Ahed’s 2005 Lebanese FA Cup-winning squad was hanging on the wall. In the centre, beaming through a grey-flecked beard from under a black turban, was Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s leader and arguably Israel’s public enemy number one. ‘From the pictures around me I’m guessing he is close by,’ Bucker says of Nasrallah during his time in charge of Al-Ahed. ‘But I never met him.’ That might be down to the fact that, since the 2008 war with Israel, Nasrallah has had to sleep in a different bed every night to avoid being assassinated. Still, Bucker denies that he was forced to sign and play only Shia players – a charge levelled by Ahed’s opponents, who also make unfounded claims that Shia players on opposition teams throw matches at the order of their spiritual leaders to ensure that Al-Ahed win the title – even if the vast majority of the team’s players come from that community. What was important for Bucker was talent and unity. The former had always been there. Bucker was convinced of that. The latter, not so much. Now the team had brought a spring to Lebanon’s step, inspiring patriotism and song. The Lebanese pop singer and her producer leave. They are off to shoot a video with a film crew just in case Lebanon do make it to Brazil. Bucker has one last training session in Beirut before taking his team to Abu Dhabi. Lebanon has a huge expat population in the UAE, and the match is expected to be a sell-out for the Lebanese. The notoriously fickle Emirati home support is unlikely to turn out in numbers given that the home side has already been eliminated, after losing every single game in the group. But first there is one more round of the Lebanese league to negotiate. On the wave of football euphoria sweeping Lebanon following the victory against South Korea, the government and the Lebanese football association have finally yielded and allowed fans back into the stadiums for league as well as international matches. Religion, they hope, can be forgotten for ninety minutes. ‘If you believe in some religious direction, fine,’ Bucker says before I leave, heading back into the freezing storm. ‘But you have to respect my way of thinking. I hope everyone is smart enough to see this. Name or belief is not scoring.’
**
Tripoli, Lebanon. February 2012.
Tripoli’s Olympic Stadium is a shadow of its former glory. The stadium used to be the pearl of Lebanese football, a modern steel and white canvas construction on the shores of the Mediterranean. The waves can be heard lapping on the scrubby beach nearby; snow-capped Mount Lebanon can be seen in the distance. The stadium was built when Lebanon hosted the 2000 Asian Cup. Then it represented the new hope for Lebanon, a mirage that was ended by Rafic Hariri’s assassination in 2005. Now the Olympic Stadium has fallen into disrepair. I had taken a bus north from Beirut for the last round of league matches before Lebanon’s vital match against the UAE. Hezbollah’s team, Al-Ahed, have travelled north to Tripoli, too. Tripoli is a turbulent Sunni enclave. The city had seen periodic clashes in recent years, firstly following an Islamist uprising in the nearby Palestinian refugee camps. There are twelve Palestinian camps in Lebanon, housing a quarter of a million refugees in abject conditions and harbouring seething resentment at their treatment by the Lebanese. Then there was the Syrian civil war, which had exacerbated the tensions between the Sunnis and Tripoli’s Alawite community, the Shia sect to which Bashar al-Assad belonged. Even in the new era of footballing détente, with the fans finally allowed to return, a match between Tripoli and Al-Ahed is still a potential flashpoint. The federation decided to move the match away from the smaller stadium in the centre of the city to the Olympic Stadium on the outskirts to try and minimise any confrontations.
The stadium looks like a place where football hasn’t been played for five years. The army seized it for use as a base for its manoeuvres against the restive Palestinian refugee camps in the north of the country. Concrete blockades the size of cars and rolls of razor wire block every path to the stadium hundreds of metres away from the entrance. Hundreds of troops stationed in APCs and carrying machine guns patrol the streets outside, checking the IDs of everyone who approaches on foot. Men with heavy body armour and mirrors on the ends of long poles check the undersides of cars for bombs. Inside, everything is in disrepair. The toilets haven’t worked for years, nor have the lights. Almost all the windows are smashed, every room filled with rubble, refuse and water. In the dark a dozen men each lay down a small rectangle of carpet and pray. The pitch, ringed by a dark red running track, is a mess of green and brown. The grass has been destroyed by the helicopters that regularly land here. More troops with machine guns, walking in pairs, patrol the track. The rains have flooded the pitch and the stands. It is only half an hour before kick-off but both penalty boxes are ankle-deep in water. Two men with coffee cups frantically scoop as much muddy water from the penalty areas as they can.
‘Look at the pitch. It is a farm, yes? It is the worst pitch in the world. Everything is bad,’ explains Khodr Arja, a sixteen-year-old Tripoli fan who cannot remember the last time fans were allowed into the stadium. He is sitting in the one covered stand along with hardly more than one hundred other fans. The final attendance for the return of Lebanon’s fans to the country’s football stadiums is 108. ‘It’s new and we are happy to see it,’ he admits, ‘but the federation is not helping the audience to come here. They don’t support us. You have to pay 5,000 [Lebanese pounds, around £2, for a ticket] and these are poor people. It should be for free.’ But even a few dozen fans marks progress of a sort. The last Lebanese league game I had attended was three years previously, at the climax of the 2008–9 season. Nejmeh, a club funded by the Sunni Hariri family, snatched the league title from Al-Ahed in the last game of the season. The final round of matches took place against the backdrop of tense parliamentary elections. On the one side was the anti-Syrian March 14 movement made up of Sunnis and most of the Christian parties, and on the other the pro-Syria March 8 movement, backed by Hezbollah. Despite fans from both sides being barred from attending their respective matches, a crowd of Nejmeh fans aligned politically with Sunni prime minister Saad Hariri and the March 14 alliance attacked the Al-Ahed team bus. I had watched as the crowd grew to a mob, beating the players and smashing the bus windows. The driver managed to escape, but only by careering the bus down the street, crushing passing cars as it went. It was a miracle no one was killed. Back then it was hard to see how the fans could ever return the stadiums. ‘We don’t see many fans but it’s better than nothing,’ shrugs Ali Hijazy, a young, bespectacled football journalist with Al Jadeed TV who is eating sunflower seeds in the freezing stands. ‘The football was miserable. Politics is a great reason why Lebanese football was bad,’ he says caustically. Bucker, he explains, can’t fix the country himself, but he’s made a decent start. ‘The politics is still here in Lebanese society but Theo Bucker is working with the national team, with no politics or religious views,’ he says, admiration in his voice at Bucker’s accomplishments. ‘The Lebanese national team is doing the job that no politician can do. It is like a revolution in Lebanese football.’
On the pitch the Al-Ahed team train amid the soldiers in the mud and cold. The team had dominated the Lebanese league in recent years for the same reason any team dominates any league in any country: money. Hezbollah operated a virtual state within a state in Lebanon, funding reconstruction projects with the help of money from Iran – its spiritual, political, economic and military ally – and donations from wealthy individuals. Al-Ahed had the best facilities, the best youth team development and the best coaches in the country. ‘Football without the fans is not football,’ says Al-Ahed’s coach, Mohammed Sahel. ‘Players cannot enjoy playing football. It is a show. You need the spectators.’ He looks up with disappointment at the few dozen fans in the stands. ‘Lebanon is a small country in football, but the last result [against South Korea] means people around the world will pay attention to
Lebanese football players. It means they have quality.’ Sahel singles out two Al-Ahed players in particular who he feels would make a name for themselves on the world stage: twenty-one-year-old winger Ahmad Zreik and striker Mahmoud El Ali. ‘Mahmoud El Ali, after his performance in the last game, he is a big star for the national team,’ states Sahel, before taking his players off the pitch and past the machine gun-wielding troops guarding the tunnel.
The match is an excruciatingly bad goalless stalemate. Both penalty boxes are so muddy that the ball simply comes to a halt in the puddles if it is passed along the ground. The only incident of note in the entire match is a penalty for Al-Ahed. Mahmoud El Ali steps up to take it, but the ball slows to a trickle on the viscous pitch and the goalkeeper easily gathers it before it can cross the line. Al-Ahed’s other star player, Ahmad Zreik, is cursing under his breath as he leaves the field. He’s used to better than this, having spent five years working in his uncle’s Lebanese restaurant in Michigan and playing college soccer before Al-Ahed called him. ‘Look at the field. It is not for soccer,’ he says, pointing to what has now degenerated into a wholly brown rectangle of wet earth. ‘I left here to go with my family to the US. But then the team [Al-Ahed] call me many times.’ Zreik was one of the beneficiaries of Theo Bucker’s new regime, and was put straight into the national team just a few weeks after returning from Michigan. ‘Every day I worked fifteen hours in my uncle’s restaurant, starting at 7 a.m., coming home at 10 p.m.,’ Zreik recalls. His brief turn in college soccer attracted some interest from a few bigger teams but the training, the studying and the hours in his uncle’s restaurant were too much for the money he was getting. ‘I only go [to the US] to work to get money,’ he says honestly. ‘They [Ahed] gave me the same money I took there. I’ll take the same money and I do what I love. I love soccer so I did that. It’s good for me.’
Thirty-One Nil Page 13
