Day 9: Cameroon v Serbia, South Korea v Ghana, Brazil v Switzerland, and Portugal v Uruguay
A couple of days ago, while promoting their crunch final match, the United States Men's teams social media accounts posted their two nations flags, but on Iran's flag, they had removed the Islamic Republic crest. In the press conference on day 9, Carlos Quieroz, Irans coach was asked about that. The most telling part of his answer sums football up, he said:
"I was born in a place in Africa. Some of you know my background. You don't know what one simple ball can do for kids who sometimes for one or two days don't eat. They don't have nothing to dress. And when we stop our cars, we open the cars and we put one ball in those parks. And you cannot imagine the magic moment that happens in the faces of kids and from sadness they change in one fraction to a smile. This is our mission."
You don't know what one simple ball can do for kids. One simple ball.
Football can get so confused, so messy, so complex, when entwined with geopolitics and the struggles between peoples, their rights, their governments and other nations.
In 1980, after Iran's Islamic revolution the previous year, the US backed an invasion of the country by Saddam Hussein's Iraq. The subsequent 8 year war extolled a brutal cost on the Iranian people, with half a million dead or wounded.
So when the US and Iran met, ten years after the end of the war, at France 98, some were calling it “The most politically charged match in World Cup history”. The Iran coach at that time, Jalal Talebi, shares similarities to current Iran coach, Carlos Quieroz. Talebi grew up in Tehran, the city where the Dasht-e Kavir, the Great Salt desert meets the Alborz mountains, before the Mountains meet the Caspian sea. Kicking around on old rubber ball on those streets, Talebi's first World Cup memory was of 1966 and he idolised Bobby Charlton.
The US players had security detail on arrival in France, and the French FFF and FIFA played down potential threats. All the same, plain-clothed police officers were at US training sessions and in their hotel.
During the pre-game ceremony, each Iranian player presented their US counterparts with bouquets of flowers, and the two teams posed together in a combined photo.
“We are all people. We are not enemies..” said Talebi, “..we weren't there to fight. We were there to play sport”
When Iran scored two unanswered goals, they made history that day 24 years ago, it was Iran's first ever World Cup win. “The people in my country have never forgotten that night and how they danced in the streets until early morning” that was Talebi again.
And from the US perspective, Jeff Agoos said at the time: “We did more in 90 minutes than the politicians did in 20 years”.
Instead of heightening tensions, that game did, at least for a few years, bring the two nations closer together. Such is the power of football. This is why it makes no sense when people say, “stick to the football and leave politics out of it”. The game, the people playing it, the nations competing, and their trials and stories, are all woven together. From the a football game played in a brief truce, on Christmas day 1914, on no-man's-land between British and German forces, or the game which sparked a war between El Salvador and Honduras in 1970, to Quieroz's story of giving a football to a group of poor children who have nothing,...
