Thirty-One Nil

by James Montague

  In a few days’ time, after this match in Cairo, Bradley will take the Pharaohs to Madrid. He has arranged for Egypt to play Chile. The South Americans are looking strong in qualification for the 2014 World Cup. Argentina are running away with the group but Chile look as if they will join them, alongside a resurgent Colombia led by striker Falcao. Chile will provide a much sterner test for Bradley and give a clearer indication as to where Egypt really stands at the moment. But Chile and the World Cup feel as far away as ever in the empty Air Force Stadium. Ahly beat Ghaz el Mahalla 1-0, Dominique Da Silva’s goal proving the difference. Only a handful of people have watched the game at the stadium, among them Khaled Mortagy, a board member of Al Ahly who sits next to Bradley. He has seen how Bradley has deported himself since taking the job. ‘I don’t think he’s an American,’ Mortagy says as we leave the stadium. ‘I see him as an Egyptian.’

  We drive back into the chaos and snarled-up traffic of Cairo. This time there are no sheep to blame for the gridlock. The return of the protesters to Tahrir Square has had a knock-on effect on the rest of the city. Aside from now being synonymous with protest and the revolution, Tahrir Square is also a major round- about and one of the busiest junctions in the city. When it is blocked, the effects can be felt for miles around. Near Bradley’s apartment in central Cairo we go for dinner. The maître d’ greets him warmly, ushering us to his usual table. Diners crane their necks to see the celebrity in their midst. Bradley has no security. He and his wife walk Cairo’s streets without fear. They see a side of the city and country that no foreign coach has allowed himself to see before and he has been rewarded with genuine respect and love. The results help, of course, and victory against Zimbabwe in Alexandria would be a huge step towards Egypt winning the group. Outside his apartment Bradley is, as he is everywhere in Cairo, mobbed for pictures. One man grabs him around the waist. ‘You are our captain!’ he shouts. ‘In America, we have Captain Crunch, Captain Hook, Captain Marvel,’ Bradley replies as he stands to attention as the photo is taken. ‘I am not your captain. I’m your friend.’

  **

  As Bradley prepared for only his third World Cup match with Egypt, Asia was coming close to the end of its qualification campaign. The final group phase was in full swing and Japan had virtually qualified for the finals already. I had stood by the side of the pitch at the Sultan Qaboos Sports Complex in Muscat, the capital of the Middle Eastern Sultanate of Oman, and watched as the Blue Samurai, now coached by former AC Milan coach Alberto Zaccheroni, scored an injury-time winning goal in sweltering conditions. Japan had not played well and Oman, who were coached by former France international Paul Le Guen, were unlucky not to win. But it was Japan’s fourth victory in five games. They would need just a point now to qualify for Brazil. In the other Asian qualifying group, the campaign had not gone so well for Theo Bucker’s Lebanon team. Bradley had met Bucker when he arranged a friendly between the two nations at Tripoli’s Olympic Stadium, the same ruined pitch I had watched Hezbollah’s team play on a year before. ‘He’s a crazy guy,’ Bradley had laughed, with affection, when I asked him about Bucker.

  Bucker’s first match of the final group stage was against Qatar in Beirut. A huge crowd, buoyed by the optimism and unity of Lebanon’s best ever World Cup qualification campaign, filled the Camille Chamoun Sports City Stadium. Lebanon were holding their own, keeping the Qataris at bay. Then, defender Ramez Dayoub hit a suicidal back pass between his defence and the goalkeeper. Qatar’s Uruguayan-born striker Sebastián Soria, one of the team’s many naturalised South American players, strode forward and stroked the ball home. Qatar won 1-0. Dayoub had played an absolute stinker and was substituted before the end. Despite the setback of this loss, there had also been moments of elation for Bucker. Lebanon had beaten Iran in a tense match in Beirut and drawn against Uzbekistan. But they would need to beat Uzbekistan, South Korea and Iran to stand any chance of making it to their very first World Cup finals. As Bucker was preparing for the crucial match against Uzbekistan in Tashkent in March 2013, a scandal broke that would effectively destroy Lebanon’s World Cup hopes. It was alleged that Ramez Dayoub’s back pass was not simply down to a mistake. A match-fixing scandal had been uncovered in Lebanon and a host of national team players had been accused, including Dayoub, Mahmoud El Ali and Ahmed Zreik, the young winger who had left his uncle’s restaurant in Michigan to return to Lebanon and play for the national team.

  Theo Bucker was a broken man. ‘We lost the first match of qualification 6-0 and this was very normal for everybody because this was the normal start for the Lebanon national team,’ Bucker says when I talk to him on the phone to find out what had happened. ‘We were suddenly showing astonishing performances. We were producing very good results. This was happening only because of me. The team and I worked closely together, everybody was listening to me. We were all believing in each other.’ Bucker was angry. But it wasn’t he who had noticed Dayoub’s suspicious back pass. It was his Lebanese wife, his dentist, whom he had married when he took charge of Lebanon’s team the first time a decade earlier. Sitting high up in the stands, Bucker recalls, she had spotted that Dayoub had tried to play the very same suicidal pass half a dozen times and alerted Bucker to it afterwards. ‘Ramez Dayoub was playing weird,’ he says of that Qatar match. ‘I checked the match afterwards and he was trying three or four times to play very stupid back passes to the direction of the opponent forward. Finally he was successful. Everybody was astonished. But no one could come close to the idea that he could do it on purpose.’ At first speculation in the local media swirled around the idea that perhaps the Qataris had paid the Lebanese players to throw the match, but that conspiracy was soon rejected. ‘There was no other club, other team, other nation coming to our players and giving them money to lose the match,’ Bucker explains. ‘A couple of players were selling their matches to a betting company. That’s it. There has been an investigation and as a result the federation has suspended twenty-four players.’

  Bucker couldn’t understand it. While the scourge of match fixing had become a huge issue in club football, World Cup qualification was a different matter. And the fixing of a World Cup qualification match in a country for whom the unity of the national team had transcended the sectarian divisions that had divided it and caused untold wars and misery seemed to be a different level of cruelty. ‘I feel very, very BAD, very, very sad,’ Bucker is shouting now. It sounds as if he’s about to cry. ‘There are players amongst them who were SELLING matches who I really trust and we were a very good group. And I never expected them to do this. And now everything is BROKEN.’

  It wasn’t just the back pass in the Qatar game that had made Bucker suspicious. He had also noticed that some of his players were living seemingly beyond their means. ‘The proof for us here is that some of the players were living a life they are simply not able to afford due to their normal salary,’ he recalls. ‘If you are getting $1,500 [a month] salary, you are not able to buy a big BMW. You don’t have two wives, five kids, two houses. You don’t always have the best mobile phone and the best clothes. Since we know they didn’t break into a bank the money must have come from somewhere.’ FIFA’s investigation into match fixing had uncovered a huge betting scam in Lebanon. Dayoub and Mahmoud El Ali, Lebanon’s star striker, who I had seen score against the UAE in Abu Dhabi, rupturing a cruciate ligament in the process and having to be carried off the pitch on a stretcher, were both suspended by FIFA, initially for life. Zreik was initially banned for one season and fined $2,000. All three continue to deny involvement and have vowed to appeal but Bucker needed to pick a host of new players and lost the crucial match against Uzbekistan, effectively ending Lebanon’s interest in the World Cup. When South Korea returned to Beirut, the site of Lebanon’s greatest victory on home soil and one that had given the team and the country such hope, only a few thousand turned up for the game. It ended 1-1, with South Korea equalising in the seventh minute of injury time. No one trusted the national team any more. They ha
d proved to be as disingenuous as every other lever of influence and power in Lebanese society. All their good work had been for nothing. ‘In Lebanon they have destroyed that belief of unity,’ Bucker says.

  He would see out the qualification campaign and resign after Lebanon finished bottom of the group. Iran, coached by former Portugal manager Carlos Queiroz, would finish top of the group and qualify for their fourth World Cup finals. They would be joined by Japan, Australia and South Korea, the four highest ranked teams in Asia before qualification began. The two third-placed teams in the group stage, Jordan and Uzbekistan, would later play each other in a two-match play-off to reach a final round against the fifth-placed team in South America.

  Now in his sixties, Bucker is unlikely to get as close to qualifying for a World Cup finals again. ‘If you make shit, it is very bad,’ he says at the end of our phone call. ‘But to steal the hope of a whole country? That is unbelievable.’

  **

  Even with the football league up and running again in Egypt, Bob Bradley had less than two months to prepare for his next World Cup qualification match at the Borg el Arab Stadium in Alexandria. This time, though, a few thousand fans were allowed into the stadium, even if the 70,000 empty seats swallowed any noise they made. Egypt had lost that warm-up match against Chile in Madrid, but by a creditable 2-1 scoreline. When Bradley returned he prepared his team for a match which, if they won, would put Egypt in command of their group. With ten minutes left the score stood at 1-1. Egypt were in control but a Zimbabwe goal would seriously jeopardise their chances. With two minutes left Mohamed Salah sprinted down the right, into the penalty box and, just as he was about to shoot, was wiped out by a Zimbabwe defender. The referee blew his whistle. It was a clear penalty. Mohamed Aboutrika stood before the penalty spot, whispered a prayer and drilled the ball to the goalkeeper’s right-hand side. As he did after every goal he fell to his knees and kissed the turf. Bradley and Zak Abdel celebrated together on the touchline. They had won three out of three, with three still to play. Bradley and the Pharaohs were halfway there.

  As Bradley celebrated his victory, the third round of matches in the African group stage spelled the end of Rwanda’s chances of reaching Brazil. After an opening day 4-0 defeat to Algeria, the Amavubi could only manage a draw against the Squirrels of Benin. As Bradley’s Egypt were beating Zimbabwe, Rwanda were losing 2-1 to Mali. It was the end of the road for Milutin ‘Micho’ Sredojović, Rwanda’s intense Serbian coach whom I had met in Kigali during preparations for their opening World Cup qualifier against Eritrea. He was fired after the Mali game. ‘We terminated the services of Sredojović Micho [sic] on grounds [sic] that he was not productive during his tenure,’ a very blunt Michel Gasingwa, from the Rwandan Football Federation, gave in a statement by way of explanation.

  Micho may have lost his job, and Bradley may have been excelling in his in tough circumstances, but there was one football team I had met so far during qualification that had perhaps overcome more than any other. Eritrea had departed from Rwanda after being knocked out of 2014 World Cup qualification. Eritrean football had been hit by a series of defections in recent years, but in Rwanda I had counted all the players back on to the team bus on the day of their departure. As had Negash Teklit, their coach. The World Cup match had seemingly stopped the rot – or so it seemed. Almost exactly a year later the same Eritrea team again travelled abroad to play at the CECAFA Cup, this time in Uganda. Seventeen of the players and officials went out shopping, never to return. Many of the players I had met in Kigali were part of Eritrea’s 18-man CECAFA Cup squad in Uganda. The Eritreans who had absconded in 2009 and fled to Australia had told me they believed more would follow, no matter what restrictions were put on Eritrea’s footballers. They were right. In February 2013, Eritrea’s players were finally granted asylum. ‘This is very good news if they have finally been sorted by the relevant authorities,’ Patrick Ogwel, vice-president of youth at the Uganda Football Association told the BBC. ‘But next time teams should come and play football and return to their countries.’ Negash Teklit once again returned home on his own with a lot of explaining to do.

  11

  BRAZIL, NIGERIA, SPAIN, TAHITI

  Belo Horizonte, Brazil. June 2013.

  Eddie Etaeta has everyone eating out of his hands. He holds a string of shells picked out of the Pacific Ocean in one, and with the other ushers a woman sitting in the small crowd in front of him to come forward. A dozen or so journalists in a small hotel conference room in the Brazilian city of Belo Horizonte watch on, happy and pacified. The woman, one of the journalists, coquettishly accepts his invitation as Etaeta places the string of white and pink shells over her head. They applaud in delight, unused to being honoured by coaches or footballers. In the Brazilian game they are more used to being harangued. Unlike the stars of the local league – some of whom will inevitably end up playing in top European leagues one day – no one here knows anything about the man sitting in front of them, nor the players he commands. ‘We brought these all the way from Tahiti,’ explains Etaeta in English with a thick French accent, delivered with a disarming smile. ‘It is a traditional Tahitian welcome.’

  Etaeta has, almost by accident, found himself at one of the world’s highest profile football tournaments. As coach of the Tahiti national football team he hasn’t needed to worry about the attentions of the international press before, most of whom almost certainly would not have been able to point out his home town on a map. The tiny Pacific island is part of French Polynesia, with a population of a quarter of a million spread across a sprawling archipelago. Football there is amateur in the purest sense. Some of the players hold down jobs as teachers and policemen and fishermen. One of them earns his living as a professional climber, clearing coconut trees and mountainsides for construction companies. Half of his team are unemployed. Crowds for games in the Tahiti league are counted in the dozens, rather than the thousands. Yet Etaeta, a teacher and former Tahitian international himself, had the previous year masterminded the greatest single moment in his island’s football history.

  The Confederations Cup is a chance for FIFA to make sure that everything is going to plan. It is held in the World Cup host country a year before the finals are due to take place. The World Cup is FIFA’s sole source of income, and the Confederations Cup is a dry run for their big pay day. It gives the organisers the chance to prove that the country is ready for the greatest show on earth but there had been signs that Brazil wasn’t anywhere near ready. Stadiums, infrastructure, hotels, everything was behind schedule. Only six of the planned twelve stadiums were ready. Stadiums in São Paulo and the odd construction at Manaus, a stadium built in a city in the middle of the Amazon rainforest that alternated between blasts of searing heat and torrential downpours in equal measure, were way behind schedule. The airports were not ready and there was no way of getting between the major cities without flying. The distance between one host city Porto Alegre, next to the Brazil/Argentina border, and Manaus is close to 2,000 miles, the same distance separating London from Beirut. But the Brazilians had patched things up just adequately enough to invite the world for a taste of what was to come.

  Along with the hosts, Brazil, Spain, the winners of the previous World Cup, and the champions of FIFA’s six confederations are also here. As Spain hold both the World Cup and the European Championship, Italy – whom Spain beat in the 2012 European Championship final – have been invited. African champions Nigeria are here. So, too, are Mexico from North and Central America, Japan from Asia and Uruguay from South America. The world’s elite players will attend: Xavi, Iniesta, Neymar, Suárez, Cavani, Pirlo. The final spot, from Oceania, is reserved for Tahiti. Previously it was always the same two nations that made it to the Confederations Cup from Oceania, but ever since Australia joined the Asian Football Confederation, the coast was now clear for New Zealand to dominate Oceania. They had, after all, qualified for the 2010 finals in South Africa, drawn all three of their matches and gone home the only team
to maintain an unbeaten record. Even champions Spain couldn’t boast that. Every tournament should have been a cakewalk for the Kiwis. But it didn’t work out that way.

  The 2012 OFC Nations Cup in the Solomon Islands doubled up as both the penultimate round of 2014 World Cup qualification and the path to the Confederations Cup. The semi-finalists would all go to the final round of qualification for Brazil, where the eventual winner would face an intercontinental play-off against the fourth-placed team from CONCACAF. The tournament began with a rank outsider among the underdogs. I had watched Samoa qualify for the tournament after beating American Samoa 1-0 in the capital of Apia. But things didn’t go well for Samoa on the Solomon Islands. They played Tahiti first and lost 10-1. I thought back to Thomas Rongen, the Dutch coach who had almost – almost – taken American Samoa to the OFC Nations Cup instead after masterminding the team’s first ever victory in thirty attempts. I imagined Jaiyah Saelua and Nicky Salapu playing in Samoa’s place, and wondered how they would have fared instead. Something told me they wouldn’t have been beaten by nine goals on Rongen’s watch.

  Tahiti were the surprise team of the OFC tournament, but there were also signs that they might be heading places. They had become the first Pacific island nation ever to qualify for a FIFA tournament when the Under 20s made it to the 2009 World Cup in Egypt. They conceded twenty-one goals against Spain, Nigeria and Venezuela but half of that team had gained some experience playing at an international tournament, even if that experience was only learning how to lose heavily. Now the four members of the Tehau family, three brothers and a cousin, who had played in that tournament were shining at the OFC Nations Cup. Between the four of them they scored fifteen goals on the way to the final. They would not, however, be playing New Zealand as tradition dictated. Somehow the All Whites had contrived to lose to New Caledonia 2-0 in the semi-finals. Tahiti clinched the title with a single goal from winger Steevy Chong-Hue. There were rumours that the New Zealand players were so sure of victory they had been out partying the night before but others pointed to the incredible heat and humidity in the Solomon Islands’ capital of Honiara and the absence of their best player, centre-back Ryan Nelsen. Either way, they weren’t going to the Confederation Cup. Tahiti were and they were drawn in a group with Spain, possibly the greatest international team of all time, Nigeria and two-time World Cup winners Uruguay.