Through the Rough Times and Through the Battles
We Defended Honourably Our Homes.
The Ones Who Defended Our Land Didn’t Die In Vain.
Our Flag Is Flying and We Don’t Have To Hide it Any More.
Here, too, were the Serbian journalists who had made the trip from Belgrade. I had travelled with them as their coach had been stopped at the Serbia/Croatia border. They had been met by three Croatian riot vans, two police cars and motorcades of police motorcycles that travelled with them front and back. A Croatian police officer had boarded the coach and addressed the passengers over a loudspeaker: ‘You should not,’ he intoned gravely, ‘respond to any provocation.’ He ordered the journalists off the bus, who were then transferred to a waiting Croatian coach. The other coach’s Serbian number plates were deemed too much of a risk. The motorcade flashed through the streets of the Croatian capital as confused onlookers wondered what the fuss was about, and then we arrived at the hotel. But there was no welcoming party of ultras, no provocation, just polite waiters handing out complimentary glasses of Croatian brandy. Soon, though, the Serbians would wish they had stayed at home.
The Serbian anthem was drowned out by screams and boos. Perhaps it was the pressure, or the occasion, but Croatia quickly took control of the match. After forty minutes Croatia are 2-0 up, both goals the result of mistakes by the two most experienced players on the Serbian team. Manchester City’s Aleksandar Kolarov carelessly gives the ball away near his own penalty box, allowing striker Ivica Olić to feed Mario Mandžukić, who blasts Croatia ahead. Olić scores the second when a cross evades everybody, including Serbia’s captain Branislav Ivanović, who, inexplicably, doesn’t clear the ball into the stand. Instead, he dithers, lets the ball pass him by and allows Olić to steal in at the back post. Even he is surprised when the ball comes to him, and it bounces off his chest into the goal. The second goal has a miraculous effect on one man sitting in the disabled area in front of the press box. He leaps from his wheelchair and celebrates with the rest of the stadium. He spends the rest of the match sheepishly smoking and drinking beer, but paces back and forth alongside the pitch until the final whistle.
There would be no comeback for Serbia. Croatia had done enough in the first half and the match finished 2-0. There was no trouble either. The Serbian journalists could only hold their hands up and admit the better side won. One predicted that Mihajlović would be sacked in the morning. The players on both sides embraced, the barriers erected by their fathers’ generation now a little smaller than they had been before the match. But, most poignantly of all, after the final whistle Mihajlović and Štimac approached each other. The peace between the two had held for four months. It had survived for the ninety minutes, even as the ultra-nationalistic chants from the Croatian fans rained down on Mihajlović. And it would survive the full-time whistle and a defeat that had surely condemned Serbia to elimination from World Cup qualification. The two men met each other again on the pitch. They embraced warmly.
For all the chants and the frenetic build-up to the game in both Zagreb and Belgrade, there was little triumphalism afterwards. Croatia had won, that was true, but the crowds went home quietly. There weren’t big celebrations in the main square, like those that had met Croatia’s qualification for the 1998 World Cup. And the anti-Serb chants, although ferocious at first, died down as the match petered out in the second half. Mihajlović and Štimac had achieved what they had set out to do. They had taken the sting out of the occasion and proved that if they could bury the hatchet, there was hope for even the most intractable of divisions. ‘I think that we saw a very fair game tonight from both sets of players,’ a clearly disappointed Mihajlović says after the game. ‘The players gave a very good example for the people back home how they should be on the pitch. We must be satisfied with that.’ The ‘people back home’ in Serbia, however, were not satisfied with that. Mihajlović would be castigated for his team’s surprisingly limp performance. He may have acted with grace, but his team had frozen on the day. The calls for his resignation started almost immediately. Igor Štimac’s reputation could not have been better. He had bested Serbia and kept pace with Belgium at the top of the group. It is easier to be magnanimous in victory than in defeat, but he was clear that something had changed that night in the Maksimir. ‘It sends a very clear message,’ he says when I ask him about his embrace with Mihajlović on the pitch after the final whistle. ‘Let’s forget the past, we have a great future. We cannot build a future on the past. We are neighbours. There is plenty to live for in front of us.’ Peace had spilled over and beyond the allotted ninety minutes. Back in the VIP tent, the folk band had gone home, the cold cuts were being packed away and Davor Šuker was leaving, his job satisfactorily done for the evening, a model on each arm.
10
EGYPT, LEBANON, RWANDA AND ERITREA REPRISED
Cairo, Egypt. February 2013.
Bob Bradley is sitting in his stationary car on a highway out of Cairo listening to the first minute of the Egyptian league season on the radio. He is supposed to be at the match, in the stands, to watch Al Ahly take on Ghazel el Mahallah. But we haven’t made it as planned. A herd of sheep has blocked the traffic in front of us. They casually mooch around the cars, moving slowly towards a pile of rotten vegetables by the roadside. ‘Café, sheep, fruit, hubcap shop,’ Bradley relays, listing the things he sees around him. Despite everything that he has seen over the past eighteen months – a faltering revolution amid the chaos of normal life – a rogue flock of hungry sheep blocking the highway is a new experience for him. ‘If I showed people back home all this,’ he says, now beyond exasperation, ‘they still wouldn’t believe me.’ Around him other drivers soon realise there’s a celebrity in their midst. Taxi drivers, delivery trucks, families, groups of young men on the way to the match, all wind down their windows and call out the same thing, ‘Captain!’, vying for Bradley’s attention. He is famous now in Egypt: Captain Bob, the man who will finally end Egyptian football’s World Cup heartache. He waves back to every request, forcing a smile for each even if he is clearly annoyed at missing the opening moments of the game he has waited a long time to see. ‘There’s been no football in Egypt,’ Bradley says, stoically staring at the jam of sheep and cars that has coagulated in front of him, ‘and we are late for the first match in a year ...’
It is eight months since I last saw Bob Bradley, after his first competitive victory as coach of the Egyptian national team. As was the way in post-revolutionary Egypt, everything and not much at all had changed since then. A few days after that victory Egypt held the second round of its first free and (largely) fair presidential election. It was won by the Muslim Brotherhood’s candidate Mohamed Morsi, an academic with a Ph.D. in engineering who had come from nowhere to become president. Although they were by far the biggest civil group in Egypt, the Brotherhood had been banned under Mubarak, who feared that they would further radicalise the country, moving it towards the Islamic fundamentalism of Hamas in neighbouring Gaza. Egypt’s Christians, who make up close to 10 per cent of the country’s population, were particularly fearful of the Brotherhood. Yet, despite the Brotherhood’s support among the poor and in the countryside, there was still a thirst for a revolutionary candidate to take power. The rules of the election were set, based on the French ‘two round’ system: a first round of voting for multiple candidates with the top two going through to the final round run-off. Several leading candidates had been banned from standing for various rather tenuous reasons. But the revolutionary candidates could not agree on one figure to lead them. The vote was evenly split. Morsi or Ahmed Shafiq, the former regime figure, was the choice they were left with. Faced with holding their noses and voting for a former Mubarak era man, or Morsi, many chose Morsi. For those who had fought, been arrested and seen friends die in the revolution, it didn’t taste like victory.
There was one revolutionary force, however, that remained strong: the Ahlawy, the ultras of Al Ahly. The last football le
ague match Bradley had seen in Egypt was on 1 February 2012, almost exactly a year ago to the day. Since the tragedy of Port Said, the league had remained suspended, largely because of the Ahlawy. Driven by the need for justice the Ahlawy prevented the league from restarting until they had secured exactly that. Seventy-three people, mainly Al Masry fans but also the head of security in Port Said, had been arrested and the trial meandered on without conclusion. Every time the Egyptian FA set a date for the league to restart, the Ahlawy would protest in huge numbers and the date would be postponed. New dates came, more protests followed and new dates went. Finally, a date for the verdict was set for 26 January 2013, a day after the second anniversary of the revolution and only six days before the first anniversary of the Port Said tragedy itself. If the Ahlawy were satisfied, the league could restart. If they weren’t, Cairo would burn.
I had arrived in Cairo to what felt like a second revolution. Tahrir Square was again thick with tear gas. It had again been taken over by protesters but this time it felt different. Most seem to be angry, disaffected youth but the protests were much more violent than I had seen before. They were aimless, nihilistic even. By the Nile, near 6 October Bridge, I had accidentally walked into a running standoff between the police and hundreds of youths. The police would fire canister after canister of tear gas at the mob, while the youths would return with rocks and fireworks, throwing the canisters they could grab hold of into the Nile before they had expelled too much of their noxious contents. The dance had been repeated for days now. From a distance, on the other side of the Nile, it was beautiful to watch: trails of white smoke arcing in the air; green and red stars exploding in the sky in reply. But up close it was ugly. When I crossed the bridge for a closer look one of the American-manufactured canisters landed at my feet. It was the first time I had been so close to one and it didn’t look too dangerous. I grabbed my camera out of my bag and took photos of the white smoke spinning crazily out. Then it hit me. Every inch of my face burned, the pain intensifying around my nose, mouth and eyes. I was blind, on my knees, unable to move as the fighting raged around me. A soft hand touched my face, arched my head back and poured liquid into my eyes. It was vinegar, and it stung, but it cleared the blindness. A young girl in a hijab had tended to me, nodded her head in acknowledgement when I thanked her and disappeared to help another person. A few days later, the large, blue riot van that the police were hiding behind when firing the tear gas was stolen by the protesters, driven to the centre of Tahrir Square and set on fire. There the burned-out shell stayed, a monument to the impotence of the police.
It was in this atmosphere that the verdict in the Port Said trial was to be heard. President Morsi knew that a postponement was not possible. An already volatile situation in and around Tahrir Square would be ignited further by the presence of thousands of well-organised and angry Al Ahly ultras. They had already helped bring down one president. A second would be a piece of cake. The league had provisionally been set to restart on 2 February, a day after the Port Said anniversay and five days after the verdict. On the morning of the verdict I arrived at Al Ahly’s training complex on Zamalek. More than 15,000 Al Ahly fans gathered outside its doors. Many had come armed, in anticipation of a further postponement or, worse still, a not-guilty verdict. Some carried clubs, others home-made pistols and double-barrelled, sawn-off shotguns. On national television at 10 a.m. the judge rose to deliver his verdict. Twenty-one of the accused were sentenced to death. The news swept through the crowd, reducing those in its path to tears of joy. The father of one of the football fans killed was hoisted on to the shoulders of the Cairean crowd as he blasted birdshot into the air. But the crowd were satisfied
Conversely, the verdicts were greeted with astonishment, disbelief and anger by Al Masry’s fans and the families of the seventy-three accused who had gathered outside the prison in Port Said where the suspects were being held. Like the Ahlawy supporters in Cairo, they, too, had come prepared. Two policemen were shot dead as the relatives tried to storm the prison. The police fired back. At least thirty people were killed in clashes over the next few days, among them a former Al Masry player. President Morsi addressed the nation and announced a thirty-day curfew, from 9 p.m. until 6 a.m., in the cities worst affected by the violence. I had travelled to Port Said, too, and seen the anger on the streets myself: protesters shot dead by police, broken curfews, the daily procession of bodies carried from mosque to grave on the shoulders of thousands, the effigies of President Morsi being burned, his pictures defaced with the horns of the devil. Everyone I spoke to had said the same thing. The verdict was a sham. Port Said had been sacrificed by Morsi to prevent Cairo from exploding.
Back in Cairo a few days later, on the same spot where the 15,000 Ahlawy celebrated the Al Masry death sentences with gunfire, flares, smoke bombs and fireworks, a very different mood covered the solemn crowd. A few thousand members of the Ahlawy had filed into the stadium, muted and reflective for a memorial service to mark exactly one year since the tragedy. Those who were there that day wept as they remembered. The name of each victim was sung in front of the families of the dead, who had gathered on the pitch. The first people on to the pitch to meet them and to greet the fans had been Bob Bradley and his wife. The crowd cheered him and sang Bradley’s name. The Ahlawy have not been fans of the national team in recent years. In the previous regime Mubarak and his family had been closely associated with the Egyptian Football Association and had sought to harness the feelgood factor of the team when it was at its devastating best. Many in the Ahlawy saw it as blindly nationalistic, epitomising the regime at its ‘bread and circuses’ worst. But they appreciated Bradley for being there and for all that he and his family had done. ‘We managed to spend some time with the families,’ Bradley says, amongst the gridlock. He and his wife met almost all of those who had lost someone at the memorial and each family had given them photographs of their loved ones. Bradley’s wife returned home with a heartbreaking stack of memories. ‘They were young people who went to a football match and tragically never returned,’ he recalls. ‘To be there and provide a little bit of support was important.’
**
Once the sheep have finished eating and the traffic jam has eased, we race towards the Air Force Stadium on the outskirts of town. It is isolated, far from any of Cairo’s suburbs, making it almost impossible to get here without driving. The Port Said verdict means that the league has returned but, as with all of Bradley’s home matches with the national team, the fans remain banned. Hundreds of armed troops protect the stadium anyway, stopping Bradley’s car and checking ID every few minutes before we arrive at the stadium’s main entrance. By the time we take our seats among the empty, soulless stands for the first Egyptian league match in 366 days, Dominique Da Silva, Al Ahly’s Mauritanian striker, has scored the first goal of the season. He removes his jersey to reveal a T-shirt underneath. On it is written: ‘Will Never Forget You’, a tribute to those that died in Post Said.
‘I think it’s important, after a year and a day, seeing football in the stadium,’ Bradley says as we watch the match. ‘We all recognise this tragedy will never, ever be out of our minds or out of our hearts, but there’s also a point, without ever forgetting, that you try to move forward.’ The match is awful. Al Ahly had been one of the few Egyptian clubs to be able to play any kind of competitive football after Port Said. Somehow the team had reached the African Championss League final, driven on by a desire to win the title and dedicate the victory to the fans who died. In November that is exactly what they did, by beating Tunisian side Esperenace. The victory saw them qualify for FIFA’s Club World Cup in Japan. Mohamed Aboutrika starred in that tournament, scoring a goal in his first match to equal Lionel Messi as the Club World Cup’s all-time joint top scorer. They narrowly lost and were knocked out by Brazil’s Corinthians but Aboutrika was sublime in the second half, almost untouchable. Yet even with the African Champions League victory and the Club World Cup prize money in excess of a million dollars,
Al Ahly were in deep financial trouble. How any of the other clubs survived was a miracle. The club was forced to send out many of its best players on loan. Striker Gedo and right-back Ahmed Fathy signed for Hull City in the English Championship, Gedo’s goals in particular helping them to secure promotion back to the Premier League. Aboutrika was loaned to Bani Yas in the UAE league for a huge fee. He went because he knew his club needed it and played with the number 72 on his back during his short time there.
Without their best players, Al Ahly was a different team, noticeably inferior. Bradley tut-tutted, sighed and shook his head, confiding in Zak Abdel, his Egyptian-American goalkeeper coach who had been with him in the MLS, the US national team and was now back in the country of his birth. ‘It’s funny,’ Bradley says of Abdel, who wears a baseball cap pulled low over his brow and whose American accent seems less pronounced every time I have met him over the past year. ‘He’s been in America for years. Zak comes back to Egypt and he forgets it all instantly,’ he chides, with a smile on his face. It is the only time during the match that he affords himself a smile. He is due to announce his next squad, for Egypt’s third World Cup qualifier against Zimbabwe in six weeks’ time, and he is not particularly impressed by what he has seen. He has done what he can to try and overcome his players’ lack of match fitness, arranging five matches since the victory in Guinea and experimenting with as many different players as possible. They have won only one of those games, 3-0 against Congo in the United Arab Emirates. Most worrying of all were the heavy defeats to the Ivory Coast and Ghana. Ghana was something of a bête noire for Bradley. The West Africans, who were a Luis Suárez handball away from becoming the first African team to reach a World Cup semi-final at South Africa 2010, had knocked Bradley’s US team out of the 2010 World Cup. Egypt would lose 3-0 to them in Abu Dhabi.
Thirty-One Nil Page 23
