I travelled for two days and through three countries to watch the Yemeni football team, and all I got was a lot of drugged up blokes with cheeks like hamsters. And you thought the English FA was bad?
Crafty Khat
The young, machine gun-wielding soldier was the only man – well, boy – standing outside Sana’a’s national football stadium. The imposing concrete bowl – ringed by faded walls of the red, black and white of Yemen’s flag – was supposed to be filled with the voices of 20,000 angry Yemeni football fans, cheering on the country’s biggest team, Al Ahli Sana’a. But the stadium was silent, and the vast car park was empty, save for the young boy rhythmically chewing on the bulge in his left cheek as he gripped tightly onto his weapon.
‘Is there not a football match on?’ I asked, whirling around trying to catch sight of someone. Anyone. I had just travelled for two days, from Spain to London to Qatar and then, finally, Yemen on money that wasn’t my own. I’d borrowed the cost of a ticket off a friend on the flimsiest of reasons; so that I could be here, to find out more about football in Yemen. It made sense at the time, but with the grinning boy soldier and his AK47 the only witness to my weeks of planning, it suddenly felt like madness. Silently he lifted his barrel and pointed it to his left, gesturing me to follow its line.
In the distance, in the corner of the car park, stood the headquarters of the Yemeni Football Association, an orphaned breeze block box adorned with an unnecessarily large sculpture of a football. The soldier grunted and I followed his cue to leave. The nerve centre of Yemeni football was equally devoid of life, except for a caretaker who had been roused from his afternoon slumber after hearing me bang on the locked doors of the FA’s entrance. ‘OK,’ he told me after I explained my predicament as he sat in his room, on the floor, with two friends and half a dozen half-full bags of what looked like spinach. All he men had the same bulge in their cheeks. He pointed to his mobile: ‘Hamid.’
Hamid Shaibani was the only man he knew who might know what was going on. He was also the man in charge of Yemeni football, the FA’s general secretary. The caretaker pressed the phone to his non-bulbous right cheek, rattled off an apology in Arabic and handed me his phone. ‘The match was cancelled!’ Hamid sang back enthusiastically. ‘We had an Olympic qualifier to play in Sharjah, against the UAE, so we cancelled the match.’ This, I later discovered, was not unusual in Yemen, where the fixture list for the First Division was often treated with the same amount of respect as a stray dog. The fans didn’t know when, where or against whom a match would kick off until the day before the game.
“‘We had an Olympic qualifier to play in Sharjah, against the UAE, so we cancelled the match.’ This, I later discovered, was not unusual in Yemen, where the fixture list for the First Division was often treated with the same amount of respect as a stray dog.”
When people think of Yemen, football isn’t at the forefront of their minds. Usually it’s just anarchy, terrorism and guns. Lots of guns. This, after all, is a country that is only second behind Saudi Arabia in providing the men who wage jihad on foreign battlefields in Iraq and Afghanistan. It also happens to be the ancestral home of Osama Bin Laden. The American military also received one of its pre-11 September bloodiest noses here after the USS Cole was hit by a suicide bomber whilst moored in the southern Yemeni port of Aden killing 17 sailors. In the Western press Yemen is usually a pretext for a story of an attack, kidnapping or beheading meted out to a Westerner.
But I had come across a story, a football story, that pricked my interest. Being ranked as one of the worst teams, not just in the Middle East, but in the world, meant that few people outside of Yemen cared for its football leagues, cups and invariably disappointing qualification campaigns for the big international tournaments, but one story had reached the radar of the international press.
Yemen Withdrew Following Doping Concerns:
AFC Yemen pulled out of the Asian Games soccer tournament because of a lack of cash to drug test their squad following reports that players were addicted to a banned substance, the Asian Football Confederation (AFC) said. Yemeni soccer chiefs withdrew the team on Thursday, citing insufficient funds to carry out dope tests ordered by the Yemen Olympic Council (YO C), the AFC said on its Web site. The YO C had advised the YFA to consider pulling out following media reports that a number of players were using the banned drug khat, a leaf which has a stimulant effect when chewed. (Reuters)
A whole squad of players being banned for drug use was interesting enough, but the fact that the drug of choice was khat made it even more intriguing. Khat is the curse of the horn of Africa, a drug that is only grown at high altitudes from Kenya all the way to Oman and which has, legally, weaved its way into the Yemeni psyche. It’s a small, innocuous-looking leaf that, when chewed over time, produces a mild euphoria and a heightened sense of awakening followed by lethargy. Depending on who you talked to it was either a mild stimulant that had the same giggle-inducing properties as weed or an aggressive cocaine-type high.
“Khat is the curse of the horn of Africa, a drug that is only grown at high altitudes from Kenya all the way to Oman and which has weaved its way into the Yemeni psyche.”
Just ten minutes at the ground had shown me that every adult – and marginally post-pubescent adolescent – exhibited the telltale signs of khat abuse – the distended cheek, watery eyes and thousand-yard stare – from the soldier to the caretaker to the youth-team players from local club Shaab Sana’a who had earlier arrived at the stadium and were milling around outside.
‘We all know what would happen if the coach caught me chewing khat,’ replied Ali, a 16-year-old goalkeeper, whilst running his finger across his throat. ‘I’d be cut, cut from the team. If he found out he would carry me out of the stadium himself.’ The other four kicked gravel around in a circle and avoided eye contact when I asked whether any of them still took the risk. The Asian Games debacle had been something of an eye opener for Yemen’s sportsmen, and the young players were glad the team had been kicked out. ‘It was embarrassing, yes,’ admitted Naif, a 20-year-old striker.
‘Because, if they had played and were on khat, they wouldn’t have been very good. They were lucky because it would have been more embarrassing if they had gone on the pitch.’ Keeping the kids off the stuff long enough to play football was a big problem – even the Shaab youth team said there was pressure from family to chew at big events like weddings. Hamid was the new general secretary of the FA, and had been drafted in to get tough on khat and wean his charges off the green stuff.
‘There will be another game, we are not sure what game, but there will be one,’ Hamid finally admitted, putting my mind and racing heart at rest. ‘I’ll pick you up where you are standing now, on Thursday and we’ll talk.’
Hamid hung up, and I walked back to the front gate, past the soldier, and waved goodbye. He was too stoned to lift his arm in reply.
This is an extract from When Friday Comes: Football in the War Zone (Mainstream), click below to buy.
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