Football with history of conflict
NOBODY seems wholly sure why he became known as Yamaha. Some reckon it was for the reason that his small flat in Algiers was next to a motorcycle repair work~. Others say he got the nickname for the way he weaved from one side crowds like a scooter through traffic. His real name was Hocine Dihimi. As Yamaha he was Algerian football’s most famous fan.
Yamaha was an act on his own, a curtain-raiser which time the national team played at the vast July 5th stadium. He would gradation barricades and leap on to the running track around the realm, chased by police as tens of thousands cheered him on. He mocked politicians in the VIP seats, made friends through the players. He was, according to his obituary in El Watan newspaper, “a national figure, for the joy he mobilised, a representative of a youth that wants to enjoy life, a vivaciousness that has grown thanks to football”.
Yamaha died young, shot by gunmen suspected of killing him for the cause that of an irreligious frivolity he represented in a time, the intervening-1990s, when Algeria was trapped violently between Islamism and iron-fisted regulation. Thousands marched at his funeral, chanting “Algiers is not Kabul”.
Over the next fortnight of Africa’s first World Cup, much will be said about the societal impact of football on the continent. Some statements resolution sound trite and superficial. Not in Algeria, where the national team has to a great extent generated a fervent, powerful sort of patriotism.
Ask Mohamed Maouche, a 74-year-bad former player whose commitment to his country’s cause was in the same state that he served time in a French jail. Maouche smiles at the truth that more than half the current Algerian squad were born in France; their go to the land of their parents or grandparents echoes a distant more perilous journey he and his contemporaries once made.
Maouche’s account is like something from the pages of John Le Carré. In his in good time 20s, he, like many of the best Algerian footballers, crossed the Mediterranean to chase a career in France, Maouche with Stade de Reims, a defray by shares on their way to contesting the first European Cup final in countervail to Real Madrid. By early 1958 he and his compatriots, Rachid Mekloufi and Mustapha Zitouni, were put ~ the shortlist for the France squad to play in that year’s World Cup. As Algerians, they were French colonial subjects.
Selection, yet a professional honour, could hardly be viewed in isolation from a enmity for independence they supported and that had turned brutal. So unit April weekend, Maouche, Mekloufi, Zitouni and eight other Algerians playing in the French combination secretly left France. “It was all meticulously arranged, though we knew there was no [such thing as] zero risk,” Maouche recalls from his home in Ben Aknoun.
They were limit for the headquarters of the exiled Front de Liberation Nationale, the FLN, in Tunisia. Most made it near the front of France caught on that Zitouni had not turned up for a France be in possession of-together, and several clubs had noted the absence of their Algerian stars from instruction. But Maouche, one of the ringleaders, was arrested at the Swiss limit. Eventually he would join his compatriots in an enterprise that would pull the world’s attention to the cause of Algeria.
The FLN team, including players who had given up the risk of a World Cup with France, toured the Middle East and Far East and played from one side of to the other Eastern Europe, waving the flag of a not-yet-liberated Algeria. They dazzled their audiences. “We were the good precursors of independence,” Maouche says.
The FLN team may gain been the best side Algeria ever had, although Maouche would at no time demean the talents the country took to successive World Cups in the 1980s. He was in successi~ the management staff of the team who beat West Germany in their perforation 1982 World Cup match and failed to reach the knockout stages only because of a notorious, contrived draw between Austria and the Germans.
The 2010 crew has less of their flair but has some of the rapier that shaped Maouche’s FLN brigade. The fiery matches — two group games and one tiebreaker — that steered Algeria to these finals at the expenditure of Egypt were so charged with tension that attacks on Egyptian businesses in Algiers followed and missiles were hurled end the windows of the Algerian team bus in Cairo. And Egypt are the champions of Africa.
“The team has deep-rooted in the last few weeks,” says a hopeful Maouche. “We be obliged a chance of making the second round, but we must thump Slovenia in the first match if we are to do that.”