Iraq prepare for UAE World Cup battle with knockout specialist Graham Arnold at the helm

Australian coach now in charge of Lions of Mesopotamia who travel to Abu Dhabi for Thursday's AFC play-off first leg

Graham Arnold took over as Iraq manager in May. Getty Images

On his first weekend as Iraq’s manager, Graham Arnold took in the full size and impact of his vast new constituency. The most celebrated club fixture in football, Barcelona against Real Madrid, was being beamed live into Baghdad homes and cafes.

Arnold was struck by the sheer size of the audience, crowding around big screens and small ones, men, women and children all gripped. And that for a match in which spectators across Baghdad, passionate though they may have been, held no deep emotional stake.

A week later, Arnold was in a stadium, incognito so he thought, watching a top-tier Iraqi domestic fixture from a VIP box when 25,000 began to chant his name. Expectations, he realised, had been set very high on what the new boss might achieve for the national team.

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Six months on from those heady introductions, Arnold, formerly the ground-breaking coach of his native Australia, arrives in Abu Dhabi still in awe of Iraqi enthusiasm and with momentum still rolling towards the big dream, a first appearance at a World Cup finals for 40 years.

Should the so-called Lions of Mesopotamia come out of Thursday’s AFC play-off first leg against UAE with a solid result, that passion, seen, heard and resonant around next week's return leg in Basra can play a key role, he believes.

He still notes the difference between holding responsibility for the dominant sporting ambition of a country of 48 million and conditions in the land of his birth.

No coach has taken the Socceroos further in a World Cup than Arnold did in Qatar in 2022. But his sport, Down Under, cherishes those moments as special, rare national celebrations, because 'soccer' is forever in a jostle to capture the attention of a population easily distracted by, say, cricket’s Ashes, or either rugby code, or the game Australians call football while using an oval ball and their hands as much as their feet.

Arnold signed a contract with the Iraq FA that lasts only to the end of November. Should his Lions progress to the next stage of qualifying, March’s intercontinental play-off matches, that may change. But for now the focus is the winner-takes-all knockout tie against Cosmin Olaroiu’s team. “Like a battlefield,” Arnold calls it.

In this type of battle, the one-off knockout, the Aussie can be regarded as an absolute specialist. His relationship with World Cup cliffhangers goes as far back as the memories of older Iraqis do of what it is like to be in grasping distance of a finals.

Arnold the player, a centre-forward, had just begun his career as a Socceroo when Australia lost a play-off to Scotland for the last spot at the 1986 World Cup. Eight years later he was among the Australians who finished second-best to Diego Maradona’s Argentina in a play-off for USA 94.

Ahead of the 1998 World Cup, Arnold was a heartbroken Socceroo yet again, when, in a two-legged contest against Iran, his team gave away a two-goal lead with quarter of an hour remaining of the tie, Iran progressing.

By 2001, he was on Australia’s coaching staff. Same old story: Uruguay beat them in a play-off for the last ticket to the Korea-Japan World Cup.

Had this habit stuck, Arnold might have felt jinxed but, as a senior member of the Socceroos management team, he played his part in finally guiding Australia through a play-off – against Uruguay – for a berth at the 2006 World Cup, where they would reach the last 16.

Four years ago, ominously, he was manager for the Socceroos’ narrow victory over the UAE that carried them, via another play-off against Peru, to the Qatar tournament.

He left the Australia job 14 months ago. The offer from Iraq came suddenly, a vacancy arising when Jesus Casas, a Spaniard who had spent two years establishing a fine reputation and considerable popularity as national manager fell sharply from favour.

A winless run of four games, three of them defeats, ended his tenure. Safe to report Casas felt wronged. “There’s a culture of immediacy there, only the last result counts,” he said on departing with the World Cup campaign still intact, albeit with the play-off route by then likelier than automatic qualification.

“There are big challenges, many of them,” one member of the current coaching staff acknowledged to The National.

Arnold’s first game in charge would be a loss, to South Korea, but since then Iraq are unbeaten in his three fixtures and have kept clean sheets in each of those, including in both matches of phase four of the elongated Asian qualifying process, where they finished behind Saudi Arabia but above Indonesia, thanks to a feisty 1-0 win last month, the decisive moment a stunning left-footed drive from Zidane Iqbal.

Iqbal is among a number of dual nationals to have been persuaded to represent the country of their heritage. The 22-year-old was born in England and came up through the youth ranks of Manchester United, for whom he made his senior debut in the Uefa Champions League, ahead of joining Utrecht in the Netherlands.

His Iraq teammates include a scattering of players born or largely raised in northern Europe, sons of the large Iraqi diaspora, especially of the communities in Scandinavia. Several of the current squad have Sweden caps on their junior-level resumes.

But the deep well of precocious native talent is alive, too, in the party Arnold brings to the Emirates. That broad passion for the sport has produced some exceptional Iraq youth teams in the recent past, such as the Olympic semi-finalists who emerged from a country at war in 2004; and the under-20 World Cup semi-finalists of 2013.

Their successors are individuals such as Ali Jasim, whom Italy’s Como gave a Serie A debut aged 20 last season, and Mohanad Ali, ‘Mimi’, the striker whose mazy club career had taken him to the Qatar Stars League and the top divisions of Portugal and Greece by the time he turned 21.

At 25, he’s been scoring at a good rate for a struggling Dibba in the UAE and his speed on the counter-attack has been an important asset for Iraq.

They will be without Youssef Amyn, the Germany-born winger, whose club, Larnaca of Cyprus, report he still has some way to go in his recuperation from injury, and they'll miss the creativity of Ibrahim Bayesh, who also has fitness problems.

Forwards Ayman Hussein, preparing for his 90th cap, and Ali Al Hammadi, of England’s Luton Town, have returned after a period of absence.

“They can help us be more efficient in front of goal,” said Arnold, looking back over the 0-0 draw with Saudi Arabia and the narrow win over Indonesia that put Iraq into the play-off. “We’ve played at a high level defensively but we need to be more effective offensively. This is a historic opportunity and we must seize it.”