Bahrain show Abu Dhabi that money can't buy international successThey may be the poorest Gulf state, but Bahrain have a better shot at qualifying for the 2010 World Cup than the UAE or Qatar
James Montague
September 5, 2008 12:03 PM
That was the 72 hours that was. Alan Curbishley walks the plank in a huff, Kevin Keegan throws his toys out of the pram - at Dennis Wise's head - and Dimitar Berbatov's on, off, on, off, on, off, on move to Manchester United finally materialises. Oh, and there's the small issue of Manchester City's new trillionaire owners from Abu Dhabi and the end of football as we know it. Suddenly the world has woken up to a new era of Monopoly football, an era where the phenomenal wealth and influence of the emerging Middle East will be felt with a force that makes the average Russian oligarch look like a market trader. But with the Premier League on an international break, and the press hungry for more, could this be the first time in history that the footballing world actually pays some attention to the start of the final stage of Asian qualifying for the World Cup?
Whilst Europe kicks off its campaign this weekend, Saturday sees two groups of five teams embarking on the last stage of a qualifying process that began last summer. The top two from each group go to South Africa automatically, while a third place play-off works out who will play the winner of the Oceania group. Which will probably be New Zealand. Around the Gulf Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Iran and, of course, the UAE - who will no doubt have both Sheikh Khalifa of Abu Dhabi and Sheikh Mohammed of Dubai in the stands when they welcome mighty North Korea - will all go into the final round believing they have a great chance of reaching the finals. After all, the three teams on the Arabian side of the Gulf have lavished huge amounts of cash on their squads, arranging top class friendlies, training camps in expensive European cities and hiring big name foreign coaches to spearhead their charge. Yet there's one Gulf state, the ugly duckling of the Persian Gulf, that may well pip all of them to the post to become the smallest ever nation to qualify for a World Cup finals: Bahrain.
With a population of just over 700,000 Bahrain is far smaller than the current record holder Trinidad and Tobago. And whilst the rest of the Gulf is preoccupied with garish adornments, Bahrain remains the odd man out, doing things very differently to their neighbour, the UAE. For one, it has a majority Shia population, yet is ruled by a Sunni royal family, a state of affairs that has led to riots, deaths and an attempted Shia Islmaist coup in the early 1980s. Since the turn of the century the king, Sheikh Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa, has charted a course through choppy political waters, giving more power to Bahrain's simmering Shia majority, loosening the ban on political parties and instigating universal suffrage whilst trying to eschew the grand pissing contests with its neighbours in favour of a healthy and well regulated bank sector. You'll even find a synagogue in Manama, something you'll resolutely fail to find in the absolute monarchies in Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Riyadh.
Bahrain is also the poorest Gulf state. While the Bahraini Khalifas didn't come close to the $200m (£113m) needed to trouble the 15 richest royals in a recent Forbes poll, Sheikh Khalifa of Abu Dhabi had his wealth conservatively estimated at $23bn (£13bn), and Sheikh Mohammed at $18bn (£10.2bn). Yet Bahrain has in recent years consistently produced national football teams of higher quality than the UAE.
As many as 14 Bahraini players were playing professionally abroad before their failed bid to reach the 2006 World Cup, where they came within one goal of beating Trinidad and Tobago in a play-off. The UAE, which kept all of its players close to home, didn't even make it to the final qualifying round. "The defeat against Trinidad and Tobago was hard as we were so close to qualifying for the World Cup finals for the first time ever," Bahraini midfielder Mohamed Salmeen told MSN. "It will be very hard to forget that moment but we will try our best to erase the bad memories by producing good performances this time around and qualify for South Africa."This time, qualification has been put in the hands of a journeyman manager from the Czech Republic. The Reds have flourished under the guidance of Milan Máãala, the kind of thick-skinned coach who would survive a nuclear winter. Somehow he has kept his head above water by traipsing from Middle Eastern club team, to national team, to club team again, being sacked by virtually everyone along way. But after dispensing with rivals Oman, Bahrain shocked the region by beating Japan in the previous round, virtually securing their passage to the last ten and sending out a warning that Bahrain had the potential to beat the best in Asia. "This was my fifth match against Japan, and today we finally beat them!" Máãala said afterwards, referring to the fact that he had previous lost 4-1 to Japan whilst coach of Saudi Arabia, which cost him his job, and a further three times whilst in charge of Oman. "I can't tell you how glad I am."
His only worry now seems to be the timing of matches. The opening group games take place during the holy month of Ramadan when his squad of Muslim players will not be allowed to take on any fluids or eat food during daylight hours. This is less of a problem for Japan's first two opponents Japan and Qatar - as several of the latter country's players have been naturalised from Uruguay. The Qataris have long been the bane of Fifa's life after repeatedly trying to get around the issue of having crap footballers by stealing the unwanted flotsam from elsewhere. First they tried buying citizenship for three Brazilian players to help them qualify for the 2006 World Cup and, after that failed, started naturalizing a string of South American players who had played for a few years in their lucrative Q League.
It is thought that Fifa's decision to tighten up its own naturalisation rules was largely down to Qatar's moss-like ability to find cracks in apparently watertight legislation. In fact, they sailed so close to the edge they narrowly escaped censure for fielding an ineligible player in the previous round, the (former) Brazilian Emerson. His status was at the centre of legal action from the Iraqi national team after he was part of the side that ended their hopes in the competition earlier in the year. It transpired he had a fake birth certificate and therefore wasn't eligible to play for Qatar at all. Whilst Emerson was banned, the protests for Qatar to be thrown out fell on deaf ears (Fifa ruled there was no way the Qatari FA could have known it was fake) and Jorge Fossati's team will be competing with Bahrain and Uzbekistan for that all important third spot. Japan and Australia should take the top two places.
Saudi Arabia, in the same group as Iran and both North and South Korea, will do what they always do in these positions - qualify with relative ease. The last time the Saudis failed was in 1990, the year that the UAE, the fifth and final team in that group, made their one and only appearance in the finals. Back then one Carlos Alberto Parreira, later to win the World Cup with Brazil, coached the UAE to three successive defeats, but not everyone lost out. Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, then president of the UAE and father of the current leader, Sheikh Khalifa, whose fortune is leading to a run on dish dasha head dresses on the blue side of Manchester, promised a Rolls Royce to anyone on the team who merely scored a goal. Two national team players came home to find a new car parked in the driveway. One suspects that, with Bruno Metsu at the helm on a huge contract, expectations will be a tad higher this time around.
Sulieman Al Fahim, the figurehead of the Abu Dhabi United Group, has already stated his wider intentions; that the investment in Manchester City will not only raise the profile of Abu Dhabi but also be a shop window for his country's footballers. The aim is to see more UAE players, like Ismail Matar - who won the Golden Ball at the 2003 World Youth Championship - and his strike partner Faisal Khalil trying to break into European teams (read: Man City).
The UAE have a tough task ahead of them and the best they can hope for is a third-place play-off with Bahrain, which would be a fascinating prospect. The cash rich, time poor Emiratis may want the world and everything in it tomorrow, but international football is a great leveller, a place where you have to play with the hand god dealt you, unless you're in charge of Qatar, of course. Bahrain's national football team has far outshone the sneaky Qataris and the lavish Emiratis in the past two qualification campaigns. This is one honour the Nahyan billions can't buy.
The Guardian
