Egyptian Football Chokes (Again)

So Cairo club, Al-Ahly, widely regarded as the best team in Africa played their first game in the inaugural World Club Championships against the Asian champions, Saudi team, Al-Ittihad. Al-Ahly were the heavy favorites riding in on the back of a world record FIFTY FIVE game unbeaten streak (in all competitions). On top of that, a win would earn the Cairo club a match with the Brazilian team, Sao Paolo, in the semis. The stage was set.

Ahly loses 1-0 in a disappointing match. Al-Ittihad dominated from beginning to end and deserved the win. Al-Ahly barely showed up. What makes this episode even more embarrassing is that Al-Ahly officials caused a huge stink and objected to the inclusion of Al-Ittihad's three Brazilian players. FIFA ruled them ineiligible for the competition and they were excluded but throughtout the whole saga, Ahly appeared weak and fussy..not the attitude you want your players to embrace before one of the biggest games of their lives. In addition, as I'll discuss later, removing the strength of the opposing team can have a negative effect on the team because it removes the built in excuse weak-minded teams have for when they lose.

Quite simply, Ahly choked, which is a feature of Egyptian soccer. The bigger the occasion, the bigger the size of our choke. I've covered this before in a previous post

For the uninitiated, here's how the dictionary defines choking:

"To fail to perform effectively because of nervous agitation or tension, especially in an athletic contest"

Men also use the term regarding a failure to "rise" to the occasion, in the case of a sexual encounter. For anyone in the know, the roots of both failures are closely related and the ability to beat them requires a similar mindset. This is something Egyptians, quite simply, lack and there are many reasons for this. The basic ones are an inherent inferiority complex toward anything external and an inabiltiy to accept criticism, even if it's constructive.

I mentioned earlier that removing the other team's strengths can have an averse effect on your own team, not least of which because your focus should be on your own team. But there's another reason: mentally weak teams focus on the excuses for failure before the contest begins, in a kind of obsessive, certainly unhealthy way. Because their fear of failure is great, the excuses for the impending failure seem comforting. For example:

"Oh, well they have more money to spend on the team than us"
"Oh, well they have three Brazilians in their team"
"Oh, their players are better paid than us"

You'd think the removal of these excuses would spur them to forge onwards but that's not the way it works with teams that don't have a mentally strong attitude. In fact, what it does is it piles on the pressure on them even more because they now have no more excuses and they view failure as an even more humiliating outcome. The fact they focus on the failure at all to begin with is the crux of the problem but when you remove their excuse, you also remove the comfort, on which much of their preparation is based.

In a sense, if Ahli officials had any idea of the way psychology works, it would almost have been better to allow Al-Ittihad to leave the three Brazilians in. Sometimes, all people need is a challenge, the odds to be against them, an occasion to rise to, in order to perform. If you don't test yourself that way, you never know what you're made of.

The other thing Egyptian players never seem to grasp is that the only humiliating thing in sports is not loss, but choking.

There's another sinister twist: Egyptians always choke against the Saudis. There are two sides of this and both are not pretty: a lot of Egyptians work in Saudi Arabia and, for the most part, there is a hatred between both employer and employee. Saudis are nouveau riche and Egyptians aren't above humiliating themselves in order to make money from them. This is typical of any rich-poor dynamic (though some poor people have dignity) but it's amplified in the Egyptian/ Saudi example. Every Egyptian has some connection to working in the Gulf and it's deeply entrenched in our cultural psyche.

Whenever Egyptian teams plays the Saudis, I submit to you that they are conflicted between an innate fear/ hatred of the Saudis for the master/ slave relationship we have with them AND a sense of responsibility which weighs down down on them because they don't want to make the lives of Egyptians in Saudi, even more miserable if they lose. Egyptians have a reputation for soccer skill which is something they've always been able to thumb their noses up at their Saudi employers. Lose that and they realise they have little else. Very little else.