21 - 27 February 2002
Issue No.574
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 21 - 27 February 2002 Issue No.574 |
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Baby's first bitter bottle
The birth of my second child, Ziyad, kept me away from writing -- and up most nights -- for nearly two months. Still I managed to keep up with the news, no small achievement as any bleary-eyed parent who must deal with the travails of a newborn will attest. I tried to stay abreast of sports as well, particularly the local scene. In one respect, I am glad I did; in another, in hindsight, I wonder why I ever bothered.
Ahli's winning of the African club football championship definitely helped me get through those postnatal blues. Ziyad was five days old when Ahli lifted the trophy. He had missed the previous three times but I was glad he was around to see this one -- even if his eyes were still shut.
When the African Nations Cup competition kicked off, Ziyad had turned one month old and could by then see, but I was not all that sure whether he liked what he saw. Certainly, there was some good football in Mali, capped by the final which had everything but goals, a common thread that ran through most of the games.
But it was the Egyptian debacle that really was an eye opener to baby and me. It is not that we lost to Cameroon in the quarter-finals. The result was expected, seeing that Cameroon was the defending champion and successfully defended the title this year. What really soured the milk was the way Egypt performed. So easy was Cameroon's 1-0 win -- the scoreline belies the one-sidedness of the game -- that it was like taking candy from a baby (oops). What we saw was a completely disoriented bunch of overpaid and overly-celebrated pretenders to the game.
If Ziyad has given me headaches, Egypt gave me heartaches.
What has come in the wake of Mali is a rerun we have seen countless times. A championship lost, the head coach sacked -- in this case El-Gohari resigned -- and the search for a new coach, preferably a foreigner.
A foreigner will not necessarily solve the problem. Former German national team coach Berti Vogts made a mess of things when he took the helm in Kuwait. The Gulf country, which was tipped to go to the World Cup, failed to get by the first round of the qualifiers. When Egyptian Mohsen Saleh was in charge, Egypt scored the most goals of any team in the qualifiers for the 1996 African Nations Cup and breezed to the championship. But once in the tournament, a new coach, Dutchman Ruud Kroll, failed to get Egypt past the quarter- finals.
The problem is not strictly about the coach. It is about players who fail to respect themselves and the national jersey they wear.
Lately, I've been sizing Ziyad up. Those two skimpy projectiles that pass for legs are beginning to take shape. And I've been checking his feet more and more, asking myself -- and sometimes Ziyad -- whether he will become a footballer. After watching Ahli, I wouldn't mind. But after the debacle in Mali -- how about track?
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