Who Does Afghanistan Football Team Represent Now?


BELEK, Turkey — Anoush Dastgir may have been the hardest-working man in football, but until Saturday he had a rough job.

Dastgir, the head coach of the Afghanistan men’s national team, was sitting in an empty restaurant at the hotel where he was preparing for an exhibition match against Indonesia. It was 11:00 pm and Dastgir was struggling with what sounded like a severe cold. This was not surprising, considering he now has a dozen jobs to do.

Coaching a national football team is tough enough anywhere, but coaching in Afghanistan has long presented unique challenges.

It is one of the poorest countries in the world and a place where civil war and the Taliban rule once prevented the national team from playing for almost two decades. The country is considered so unsafe that FIFA, football’s global governing body, has long banned its teams from playing at home. Most of the time it didn’t matter much: Afghanistan ranks 152nd in the world. And it never qualified for a major tournament.

However, conditions became more difficult over the summer when the Taliban returned to Kabul, the Afghan government collapsed, and its president, Ashraf Ghani – not to mention tens of thousands of his compatriots and women. fled the country.

Dastgir lost access to part of his team and half of his staff in the chaos. The two staff are now in refugee camps in Qatar. The other two are in Afghanistan, dying to leave. Almost all of its staff is populated by Afghan refugees or the sons of refugees who have sought refuge over the years in the Netherlands, Germany, the United States, Sweden and beyond, fleeing the various conflicts that have affected Afghanistan since the 1980s. But few people still spend time in Afghanistan, and even doing so this year has been cause for concern.

Noor Husin, one of the most important actors of Dastgir, who went to England when he was six years old, was in the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif in July as the Taliban approached. “To be honest, I was scared,” he said. “Because every day the news was coming, they are approaching, on the outskirts of the city. And I was thinking, definitely not. You just didn’t think it would happen.”

Husin managed to reach Kabul and flee the country, but – like many of his teammates – he thought the national team was over. Everyone thought, this is the end, the end of everything,” he said.

Still, Dastgir said he was determined to keep it alive and serve, but a rare symbol of unity in a country divided by ethnic or linguistic lines. So he picked up the phone a few weeks ago and arranged a friendly match against Indonesia – for the first time since the Taliban took over. This was the easy part. He then needed to find a site for the game, arrange flights and visas for players, and conduct coronavirus tests for everyone. With the Afghan football federation’s bank account frozen, Dastgir successfully petitioned FIFA to finance the trip.

Not a kit man, Dastgir also had to ship his 450 pounds of training equipment himself, then persuaded his brother-in-law to help him wash it. He bought soccer balls, arranged for referees and – without a communications team – promoted the match on his dedicated social media accounts. He even negotiated a broadcast contract to ensure that the maximum number of people in Afghanistan could watch the match. And then, after doing all that, he still had to find time to coach the team.

But as midnight approached in the hotel restaurant on Saturday, there was another important problem to solve: Which flag would the team fly?

31-year-old Dastgir is one of the youngest coaches in world football. Born in Kabul, he fled the country’s civil war with his family shortly after Soviet forces left Afghanistan in 1989. He was only a few months old and was raised in Pakistan and then India before settling in the Netherlands.

He learned Dutch in Europe and was discovered by a leading club, NEC Nijmegen. He was eventually called up to the Afghan national team, but made several appearances before a knee injury ended his playing career.

“My coaches said, ‘You have to start coaching,’ because as a player I was like the leader of the team,” he said. His first opportunity to lead Afghanistan came in 2016 when a foreign coach was absent from the game due to a contract dispute.

“The cast said, ‘I think he can handle Anoush,'” Dastgir said. He lost the match but the team played well. The job was given in 2018 when the post was next opened.

Until then, he was looking for Afghan players. Many were discovered among the vast Afghan diaspora, refugees, and their children spread across the globe. When a match against Palestine was held in Kabul in 2018, the first international match played in Afghanistan in years, Dastgir sought out many of his discoveries.

“I wanted to have these actors in Afghanistan to feel the country, to see the people, because most of them are born outside the country,” he said. “So, if you tell them to play for your country, ‘What is this?’ they say.”

Even now, the team’s place as a visible multicultural institution is emerging in the training sessions.

Instructions were shouted in Dutch and Pashto. The incentive was offered in German, Dari and English. Dastgir would sometimes switch languages ​​mid-sentence. “My first captain is Tajik,” he said. “My mate is Pashtun. Hazara, my third captain.” Two of its actors, brothers Adam and David Najem, were born in New Jersey.

Still, as the match drew closer, questions about the flag and the anthem remained unresolved. This was not a decision to be taken lightly. White flag of the Taliban, Shahada – Muslim declaration of faith – It replaced the green, red, and black tricolor above Afghanistan’s presidential palace. And since the Taliban imposed a broad ban on music, the national anthem was virtually banned.

Dastgir knew that playing and waving the old flag would be controversial; country’s men’s cricket team scolded by a Taliban leader after he did so at the Twenty20 World Cup. He knew his choice could cost him his job or worse.

“I am not afraid of getting fired,” Dastgir said. “I am the head coach of the 37 million Afghan national team. I am not the national team coach of the Taliban regime or the Ghani regime. We never did this for the government. “We did it for the people,” he said.

No one in Afghanistan’s camp was sure whether there would actually be a fan following in Belek, a coastal town near Antalya.

Stadium officials were appeased when Dastgir, concerned about coronavirus restrictions, agreed to pay for security out of his own pocket. There was also the issue of whether the Turkish police would act as a deterrent. At least 300,000 Afghan refugees and migrants have sought refuge in Turkey in recent years, and many are undocumented. But as the daylight faded and kick-off approached, hundreds of fans lined up outside the stadium gate.

“I want to show that I’m Afghan,” said Mursal, an 18-year-old student who was wrapped in a large Afghan flag but was so cautious that he refused to give his last name. He fled to Turkey four years ago after his father was killed in Afghanistan and has had few opportunities to wave the Afghan flag since arriving. “This is our flag. You have no other flag. Only this flag and no one can change it.”

Six hundred fans – the limit agreed with stadium officials – soon flocked inside, filling the stadium’s only long tribune.

A few minutes before the kick-off, the teams lined up in the midfield. In front of them, two of Afghanistan’s reserves unfurled a large green, red and black flag, which Dastgir took to Belek. The anthem was played, and in a moment millions of Afghans returned to their homes. There was no one to take the traditional pre-match photo: the team’s official photographer fled to Portugal months ago.

The game was frenzied by the constant noise of Afghan fans as background music. Dressed in all black, Dastgir calmly gave tactical instructions. Late in the second half, he summoned Dutch midfielder Omid Popalzay, who was last seen playing in Poland’s fourth division. A few minutes after entering the game in the 85th minute, Popalzay scored. Minutes later, the final whistle blew. Afghanistan had won and the fans were overjoyed.

A fan jumped 12 feet down onto the running track that surrounded the field, hoping to take a selfie, but was stopped by police and walked back down the frog’s neck. One player, Norlla Amiri, climbed onto the shoulders of a teammate to get her younger son to pass on her.

Other fans also asked for selfies by throwing their cell phones at the players. Many wanted to be photographed with 30-year-old midfielder Faisal Shayesteh, who has had a world-class professional career since moving to the Netherlands as a child.

Almost all Afghan fans knew Shayesteh for her tattoos, including one on her chest, which depicts the silhouette of Kabul under a fighter jet and an attack helicopter, each bombarding the city with red hearts. Above her left breast were two GPS coordinates: the first is the city of Hengelo, in the eastern Netherlands, where she grew up. The other is Kabul, where he was born.

“I get emotional if I talk about it,” she said, holding back her tears. “Because I know what people in Afghanistan are going through. And I know that winning a game for the national team is the only thing that makes them happy. It’s all they have, so I’m very happy.”

Dastgir watched everything from behind and snapped some of it to his phone to post on his Instagram account. No one had done more to make that moment happen.



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