It was the shot seen around the world, Kuwait’s golden boy Faisal Al Dakhil unleashing an unstoppable shot past Czechoslovakian keeper Zdenek Hruska to cancel out a lead from a penalty by none other than Antonin Panenka to earn a 1-1 draw. The Asian champions had announced themselves at the 1982 World Cup in Spain in stunning style.
That was as good as it got for Kuwait’s fabled “Golden Generation”. The euphoria of that memory in Valladolid lasted only a few days. A 4-1 defeat to France was followed by a 1-0 loss to England as perhaps the Arabian Gulf’s greatest team exited the tournament ignominiously.
As the current squad resume their joint qualifying campaign for the 2018 World Cup and 2019 Asian Cup against Myanmar on Thursday, it seems hard to believe that a nation now ranked 126th in the world once ruled the continent.
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June’s 1-0 win over Lebanon was welcome, but it will take far more that to convince supporters that their national team is anything but an irrelevance at international level.
So just what went wrong with Kuwaiti football?
The Gulf War in 1990 is a watershed moment after which Kuwaiti football never recovered its former glory.
And what glory it was.
Between 1970 and 1982 Kuwait won the Gulf Cup of Nations five times out of six, claimed an Asian Cup on home soil in 1980 and took part in the 1980 Moscow Olympics, as well as the 1982 World Cup in Spain.
There was a perfect marriage of a sublime group of players; colourful, loyal and knowledgeable supporters; and a forward-looking football association.
Jassem Yaqoub, Abdulaziz Al Anbari, Hamad Abu Hamad, Fathi Kameel, goalkeeper Ahmad Tarabulsi, captain Saad Al Houti and Al Dakhil. Under Brazilian coaches Mario Zagalo (1976-78) and Carlos Alberto Parreira (1978-82), the boys in blue transcended football fame to become national heroes, and politicians and celebrities lined up to heap praise on them.
Al Dakhil earned the nickname of “the King” from Sheikh Fahad Al Ahmad Al Jaber Al Sabah, the head of the Kuwaiti FA, and “the Hurricane” from the country’s most renowned actor, Abdulhussain Abdulredha. Yacoub was “the Terroriser”; Kameel “the Gazelle”.
The team’s odyssey was soundtracked by legendary commentator Khalid Al Harban, endearingly remembered as the 12th member of the team.
“He was part of the golden generation,” said striker Yaqoub, top scorer at the third and fourth Gulf Cup wins. “He played a part in all our achievements. Not just in Kuwait but all across the Arab world, everyone knows him. For us he was like a teacher and a brother. He was one of Kuwait’s icons.”
Last year, the captain of that golden team Al Houti spoke of a bygone, utopian era.
“We were complete on all fronts, in terms of skill and technique, fans and media,” he told Al Khabar Sports channel.
“We had excellent management and players of the highest standard in every position. We had world class, ambitious coaches, and an open-minded media. We achieved one victory after another with new players emerging all the time. Coaches struggled to pick the best formations. How do you not pick one of Jassem Yaqoub, Faisal Al Dakhil, Fathi Kameel or Abdulaziz Al Anbari?”
According to Abdullah Bishara, the Kuwaiti first secretary-general of the GCC, one factor played a major role in the country’s football success: lack of political interference.
“At that time sports was immunised from politics, it was isolated and kept away from domestic politics of Kuwait,” said Bishara, who served from 1981 to 1993.
“In the ’70s and ’80s when the late Sheikh Fahad Al Ahmad Al Jaber was the head of the Kuwait FA, he and his other colleagues from the Gulf worked together to achieve one philosophy in football, based on ethics and promotion of professionalism and entrenching of sporting spirit.”
But by the mid-1980s the team had reached the end of the road.
With an inferior crop of players replacing Al Houti’s charges, the decline was dramatic, painfully highlighted when the team were humbled in their 1986 World Cup qualifying group by Syria.
Kuwait were suddenly regional mediocrities. Iraq’s invasion in August 1990 rendered a Gulf Cup title at home earlier that year (in the absence of Iraq and Saudi Arabia) virtually meaningless.
When the war ended a year later, Kuwaiti football, unsurprisingly, went through a long-term downard spiral, on and off the field. Gulf Cup titles in 1996 and 1998 merely papered over the cracks.
“After the invasion, and the death of Sheikh Ahmad, things became different,” said Bishara. “Politics surreptitiously invaded the sporting arena, chiefly football.”
Political turmoil continued to hinder the country’s football development, and the Kuwaiti FA was twice suspended by Fifa for political interference, in 2007 and again a year later.
It was a world away from the glory days for Bishara.
“During the golden era, there was a unity of purpose, there was a devotion and dedication and there was a nationalistic drive to achieve the best possible results,” he said.
“But that’s not the case now, there is a lot of squabble in the football arena. There is a lot of blustering and evasiveness, and a portion of blaming each other.”
The nadir, off the pitch at least, was reached with the closure of the Kuwait FA headquarters in June 2010 by the government’s public authority for youth and sports after a dispute had split the country’s 14 sports clubs into two factions each backed by prominent royals.
The upshot was the eviction of the five-member board led by Sheikh Talal Fahad Al Sabah, brother of the president of the Olympic Council of Asia Sheikh Ahmad Fahad Al Sabah, now also on Fifa’s executive committee.
The Al Sabahs exerted their influence quickly, yet Kuwaiti clubs continued to suffer from a crippling inertia.
Poor facilities, little investment and lack of professionalism in the eight-team Premier League have been reflected in the national team’s continued decline. Before last year’s Gulf Cup in Riyadh, Al Houti painted a grim picture.
“There’s no real interest in the national team,” he said. “The training camps are poor, preparations are few and short-lived. The odd two weeks are not enough to create harmony between the players. The fitness levels of the current generation is inadequate and I see the national team is lacking in skill, mentality and support. There are no long-term plans that are being implemented.”
No Kuwaiti club has been seen in the Asian Champions League group stage since 2008, when Al Qadisiya progressed to the quarter-finals before losing to Urawa Red Diamonds of Japan.
The last year has been particularly harrowing. A woeful showing in the 2014 Gulf Cup in Saudi Arabia was capped by a 5-0 thrashing by Oman, a low point in Kuwait’s football history.
At January’s Asian Cup in Australia, they lost all three group matches to Australia, South Korea and Oman respectively.
“In our day, everyone worked hard without asking for anything in return,” Yaqoub told the defunct Al Watan TV last year. “The players didn’t think of earnings. Coaches gave everything and were not greedy, the fans enjoyed what the team gave. Now, players and management want to know what’s in it for themselves. Before it was about giving, not taking.”
Wins against Myanmar and Laos over the next week might get fans on board again. But few of them will be foolish enough to predict a return to former glories any time soon.
akhaled@thenational.ae
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