RIYADH, 4 June – Riyadh’s streets were calm on Saturday. No extra police were on duty at major intersections. No horns were heard. And no youths went wild. Still, it was not an ordinary day for Saudis and most of us know why. The World Cup is held every four years. Thirty-two nations compete for the World Cup because they have qualified.
Can anyone tell me then why a national team which has qualified for World Cup competition three times and has also won the Asian Cup three times failed to score a single goal on Saturday?
Indeed it was not an ordinary day for Saudi Arabia. People ran to their phones and began "condoling" with their friends. The entire country was in shock about our team’s defeat. Everyone was badmouthing the team and was trying to find answers for what had happened.
Some clever people got their acts together and immediately invented new mobile text messages that spread like wildfire and were laughed at by all. One of the more amusing messages — referring to to the popular TV show, "Who Wants to be a Millionaire?" — read "Who was the German player who did NOT score in the match?" Another was "An Eight-Cylinder Mercedes Runs Over a Saudi Camel in Tokyo." You get the drift.
Though I saw only some of the match but most of the goals, I was not surprised by the 8-0 score. In fact, judging from how our players handled the ball, I expected ten goals. I am not a sports analyst and I rarely play football but what I do know is that, as in all sports, the best players win.
And we Saudis must admit that we were trounced by German ingenuity.
It was put very succintly by Fahd Al-Hiraifi — a former football star who participated in the 1994 World Cup. He said in a telephone call to ART, "It was as if our players had never played football before. They did not have a plan and sometimes we even saw five players near each other in one place." He did not put all the blame on the Saudi coach but did add that if "every player knew his position and knew what he had to do, this tragedy could have been avoided."
Perhaps the day will come when we finally understand why our players "suddenly collapsed" — the words of the team’s head coach, Nasir Al-Jawhar. And perhaps we will learn from what we have come to understand.
All this notwithstanding, our hopes are still high for our national team to improve their performance in the coming matches against Cameroon and Ireland. Let us hope and pray that even if we are defeated — may God forbid — that we score some goals so that we can leave the World Cup competition with a little dignity.
