Issue No.587
Sports
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23 -29 May 2002 Issue No.587 Sports |
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 | Recommend this page | ||
Ahli and Zamalek at home
Some people like to see the famed local derby in the stadium. Others prefer the neighbourhood café. And some watch it at home which, Abeer Anwar writes, can be the least comfortable place
The 6-1 drubbing that Ahli administered to Zamalek last week is still reverberating throughout the country -- in workplaces, clubs, the media and in households where much of the aftershocks were felt.
Click to view captionSince I was little, I learned that extraordinary preparations are made for Ahli-Zamalek encounters, and not just on the field. Before the game, my father, an avid Ahli man, used to ship us, my two sisters, brother and mother, to our grandmother so that he may concentrate fully on the proceedings. We always returned home that day, although if Zamalek won, it would have been better to spend the night in granny's bed.
Like father, like daughter, I am an Ahli supporter but my husband cheers for the enemy. The minute I entered the house last week, he started a big hue and cry over nothing, for no reason, but of course, there was a big reason: Zamalek was down 2-0. A curfew went into effect and I took shelter in the bedroom which has no TV set. I tried to keep tabs on the match from what I could hear from the shouts in the café nearby.
I sneaked out every so often to catch a glimpse of the match on the set in the living room. To do that, I had to act totally oblivious to what was happening on the TV -- not so easy considering how the game was evolving -- and to pretend I was looking for a whatever.
I was floored by the final score, ecstatic, but had to celebrate to myself, inside my makeshift refugee camp. The day ended with me taking a deep breath after my husband, shell-shocked, went to bed without saying a word.
I was a bit luckier than a friend, Nashwa, who told me the following day that she did not see the match at all because big brother Hazem, of Zamalek, was at home, screaming his lungs off with every Ahli goal.
So many women have told me that before marrying they rooted for so-and-so but changed clubs to fall in line with their husbands. But one bride-in-waiting never got the chance. The father of another friend, Marwa, refused to give her away to an Ahli suitor because the family tree was wrapped in the exclusively Zamalek red and white colours. (Apparently, Marwa's father is also a big fan of George Bush's you're-either-with-us-or-against- us motto).
"I love him. I want him," Marwa protested, but her father had made his mind up and the prospective groom was shown the red card. Marwa, her father scolded, had brought disrepute to the family and had stained its name.
Some domestic disputes have ended in worse fashion. A few years back, a man, distraught that his Zamalek team had lost to Ahli, killed his wife after she brought him a watermelon as an after-game treat. When he cut the fruit in two and found it was red, he thought his wife was teasing him so he extracted the knife from the watermelon and plunged it into her as well. Such are the family feuds on derby day.
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