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  1. #1
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    Forgetting the Hate - The Iraqi Olympic Soccer Team

    Caught this story on MSNBC and thought I would share it. It reminds me that sports many times brings unlikely people together and makes them forget how to hate each other.
    ------------------------------------
    Working together works for Iraqi soccer
    Team abandons hate to fight for improbable medal

    COMMENTARY
    By Ron Borges
    NBCSports.com contributor
    Updated: 6:28 p.m. ET Aug. 19, 2004


    ATHENS, Greece - One more unlikely victory and the Iraqi soccer team will be something no one would have thought possible just a few months ago. They will be Olympic medalists.

    But advancing from Saturday's quarterfinals to the semifinal medal round is a small step for a team of athletes that already made a giant leap for their war-torn country and for themselves.

    Not so many months ago there was no reason to believe the Iraqi soccer team, which had not competed in the Olympics since 1988, would be anywhere near Athens this week. Their German coach and father figure, Bernd Stange, had just quit, fearing for his life. And their team had to beat Saudi Arabia, which it had not done in years, to be among the qualifiers.

    Somehow they did it.

    After being the only known Olympic competitors to reach Greece via military airlift, the Iraqis then had to face the powerful Portuguese in their first game. They did more than that. They won 4-2.


    A fluke, most soccer observers said. Then Sunday they not only defeated Costa Rica 2-0 to reach the quarterfinals, but did so with a display of what will be necessary for their country to build the kind of nation most living there want: a unified one.

    In a metaphor for what defines the Olympics and a country, the only Kurdish player on the team, Hawar Mulla Muhammed, scored the game's first goal and assisted on the second, sending a soft crossing pass to Mahdi Karim, a Shiite.

    In a country split by factionalized fighting between Kurds, Shiites and Sunnis for 2,000 years, it was a signal to people back home that one's faith did not matter. What matters is cooperation and the willingness to work toward a single purpose.

    In the short term, that idea is helping Iraq earn victories at Athens. But if the lesson of this team is learned, there is more they can do. They can become a salve for a country's wounds and an example of how best to bind them.

    “Our job is to help rebuild the country to be what it can be,” coach Adnan Hamad said after the victory over Costa Rica. “We know what this means to our people. We hear the news from home and the players talk about the bad news, but it makes us more determined.”

    More determined to win, to be sure, but perhaps more determined to do more than that. This is a team made of mostly Shiites, but also a great number of Sunnis as well as Muhammed, the lone Kurd. Therefore, it is a team that could have become as factionalized and fractured as its country's politics. Instead it has come together, all sides working toward one goal. Victory for all. Not for one side or the other. For all.

    It is probably too much to ask for a soccer team to transform a country, but there is a lesson in their remarkable and unexpected success. It's that working together works. For a country that has been at war for decades in one form or another and ruled by a vicious dictator for nearly as long, that is a message worth receiving. Sometimes it is a message that must first be written on the level playing fields of sport, like Jackie Robinson breaking the color barrier in baseball in 1947 for the Dodgers.

    It happens there first, this idea of abandoning old hates and fears in exchange for cooperation and, in the end, victory. Perhaps it must be delivered there first, on a place where politics counts the least because it seems safest there for all involved.

    No one in Iraq cared that a Kurd scored the first goal against Costa Rica. They just cared that an Iraqi scored. Muhammed didn't refuse to send the ball in Karim's direction late in the game for religious or political reasons.

    He didn't see a Shiite or a Sunni. He saw an Iraqi, like himself. A teammate. Back in ravaged Baghdad and war-torn Najaf and elsewhere, they saw the same thing. No quarrels on the team that wore green and white. Only one team.

    One winning team that has become so big a story that NBC has decided to televise its quarterfinal match Sunday, a scheduling shift as unexpected as the Iraqi team's rise.

    (NBC is a partner in the joint venture that runs NBCSports.com.)

    When the final whistle sounded at Karaiskai Stadium and the game was won, the players linked arms and walked in the direction of their very loud fans, several of whom had already swarmed onto the field when Muhammed scored and had to be restrained by guards and Iraqi players.

    As they approached them, the fans engulfed the players and they all held hands in a single line.

    Not a line broken by hate or grudges. Not one sundered by rivalries whose origins were long forgotten. One line. One purpose.

    That is something that will work for a soccer team, as the Iraqis have shown, but it will work just as well for a country.

    "The games in Athens are the only way for Iraqis to forget about their tragedy,'' midfielder Hassan Turkey said.

    He's right. But there is more that this team's success can do. It can be a reminder of possibilities to a country whose people for too long felt they had none.

    Ron Borges writes regularly for NBCSports.com and covers the NFL and boxing for the Boston Globe.
    Our greatest accomplishments cannot be behind us, because our destiny lies above us. - Matthew Mcconaughey - Interstellar

  2. #2
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    What an amazing world we live in!

    WARNING: If you detect sarcasm you are correct in your judgement.

  3. #3
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    Iraqi Soccer Team to fight for Bronze

    Iraq's plucky soccer team loses chance for gold medal
    By DAVID CRARY, Associated Press Writer

    August 24, 2004

    THESSALONIKI, Greece (AP) -- The Iraqi soccer team's improbable run at an Olympic gold medal ended Tuesday night with a 3-1 semifinal loss to Paraguay. The Iraqis still have a chance for a bronze, which would be their war-weary nation's first medal in 44 years.

    Paraguay made history of its own, getting two goals from Jose Cardozo and one from Fredy Bareiro to advance to Saturday's gold-medal game against Argentina, a 3-0 winner over Italy. Gold or silver, it will be the first Olympic medal of any sort for Paraguay.

    Iraq and Italy will play for the bronze Friday night.

    Just qualifying for the Olympics was a feat for the Iraqis, who have been unable to play home games since war began in March 2003. They clinched a berth in May, just three months after their country was reinstated by the International Olympic Committee.

    The team's first-round victories over Portugal and Costa Rica and quarterfinal win over Australia enchanted fans worldwide and gave beleaguered Iraqi citizens a rare cause for unified jubilation. Players said they were inspired by the support from home, but also sobered by knowledge of their compatriots' hardships.

    The Iraqis played with pluck, forcing Paraguay goalkeeper Diego Barreto to make several acrobatic saves. But they could not contain Cardozo, at 34 one of the oldest players in the tournament.

    Cardozo, a forward for Toluca in the Mexican League, opened the scoring at the 17th minute, taking a pass off his chest and, as an Iraqi defender tugged him down by his jersey, angling a low shot into the corner past Iraqi goalkeeper Nour Sabri.

    He scored again 34 minutes into the half, ricocheting a shot off Sabri's leg into the net after the Iraqi defense relaxed, believing Cardozo would be called offsides.

    Just moments earlier, Iraq had its best chance of the game, when midfielder Qusai Munir forced Paraguay goalie Diego Barreto to make a diving fingertip save.

    Iraq applied intense pressure early in the second half, but Paraguay put the game out of reach on a counterattack. Sabri made a diving save, but the ball rebounded off the post into play, and Bareiro hammered home the close-range shot over the goalie's head.

    Even down 3-0, the Iraqis persisted, and finally broke through in the 84th minute. Emad Mohammed slid a pass through the mostly effective Paraguay defense, and Razzaq Farhan beat Baretto with the shot.

    The Paraguay fans on hand to celebrate were far outnumbered by hundreds of Iraqis, many of them expatriates living in Greece and elsewhere in Europe. They began their chants, songs and drum beats more than an hour before the game, and thrust their arms into the air in salute when their national anthem -- ``My Country'' -- played before the kickoff.

    A bronze medal won by an Iraqi weightlifter in 1960 is the only medal in the country's history.

  4. #4
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    Well, win or lose, they still had a lot of "balls"* to do what they did.

    *(hahahaha)
    Sgt. Johnny Beaufort: He says, "The Apaches are a great race," sir. "They've never been conquered. But it is not well for a nation to be always at war. The young men die... the women sing sad songs... and the old ones are hungry in the winter."
    Fort Apache

  5. #5
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    They had balls before and then they were cut off

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