Almost exactly a year ago, Rabah Saadane approached the first crucial phase of Algeria's 2010 World Cup adventure with moist eyes. If it had been nostalgia that prompted the tears, that would have been more than understandable. Saadane is in his fifth spell coaching the Desert Foxes, as the national team are known, and his second World Cup as the principal strategist.
But it was not so much nostalgia as a symptom of the huge pressure that burdens the job that had got to Saadane, 64, when, last June, he let tears fall while facing the media in Blida. Algeria were about to face Egypt, a rivalry as intense as any on the African continent and one whose history is punctuated by explosive and often unpleasant episodes. He feared violence should his team lose. The sequence of qualifying matches the two North African countries would play on the road to South Africa would only add to the long Egypt-Algeria soap opera. After the press conference where Saadane displayed his emotions, Algeria won at home tie against the African champions. In Cairo, later in qualifying, they then lost 2-0, leading the two teams to a one-off play-off in neutral Sudan. Saadane came out on top. Except for a fourth chapter in the latest saga, a humiliating 4-0 defeat to Egypt, in which three of his players also lost their equilibrium and were sent off in the January semi-final of the last African Cup of Nations, Saadane's spearing of the Egyptians would have earned him everlasting popularity.
What Saadane does have is wide admiration. "In our squad we all have a lot of respect for the coach," Hassan Yebda, the Algeria midfielder told the French newspaper L'Equipe yesterday. "We are completely unlike the France team in that. I will call the coach 'Cheikh', his nickname, but I would always address him as 'vous' not 'tu'." ("Vous" is the more formal term in French.) "Nobody talks badly about him and I can't imagine them doing so."
Some of that comes from Saadane's seniority. Algeria's players know that he belongs in a brave generation who grew up under the colonial rule of France: he was 16 when the country gained its independence. He played club football there alongside men who had given up their careers in the French league to join a renegade "national team" organised by the freedom fighters of the era; the Front de Liberation Nationale. The struggle of the 1950s and early 1960s still defines the country and Saadane evoked it in preparing his players for their match against England last Friday. He arranged for them to watch the haunting, but inspiring film about the fight for self-determination, Gillo Pontecorvo's classic, The Battle of Algiers.
Saadane is a patriot, but he is also worldly. After a playing career cut short by injuries sustained in a car accident, he established a good enough reputation as a young coach to take the national squad to the 1986 World Cup aged 40. He then moved abroad, winning the African Champions Cup with Morocco's Raja Casablanca in 1989. He also coached the Yemen national side. And he is unique, at this African World Cup, for being a native African in charge of one of the five African teams.
It is a perpetual problem on the continent - Ivory Coast and Nigeria both appointed Swedish managers who had never worked in Africa only a matter of weeks before the tournament began - that federation presidents seem to mistrust native coaches to handle players who mainly represent clubs in Europe. Algeria have bucked the trend in each of their three World Cups. But for this one, Saadane has had to tread a delicate path through issues of nationalism. The majority of his squad are drawn from Algeria's large diaspora, most of them born in France, where their parents had settled. In a few cases he needed to persuade players to commit to the country of their parentage rather than that of their birth. Hard decisions had to be made, too, when some of the newcomers arrived. Yazid Mansouri, his captain, was dropped after the first match, to be replaced by Anther Yahia. He replaced his goalkeeper, too, after a 1-0 defeat to Slovenia. A raised level of performance in the scoreless draw with England indicated Saadane's tougher decisions have been the right ones.
"Rabah Saadane is open to everything and he has lots of dialogue with his players," Yebda said, "but he will always have the last word. You can say to him you feel more comfortable with a certain tactical system. But he will make a decision, and if he prefers something else, he will go with that." sports@thenational.ae
