More than 60,000 dead, countless rapes, eight million displaced, almost two million refugees, 19 million children who cannot go to school… While the world looks at the war in Ukraine and the conflicts in Gaza, Syria and Lebanon, horrible in themselves, the greatest humanitarian tragedy is unfolding in Sudan, where many soccer fields have been turned into cemeteries. In those that do not, the game continues when lulls allow, even at the risk of receiving shots instead of balls. But it is a form of escape for a lost generation.
And in the midst of the catastrophe, exiled in Morocco and playing home games in Rabat, Benghazi (Libya), Mauritania and South Sudan (the neighboring country), the national team will be in the final phase of the Afcon (African Football Cup). Nations), which will be played starting in December next year, and leads its qualifying group for the World Cup. Of the four matches played so far, they have won three and drawn one, and if they finished first, they would have a place in the tournament that will be hosted by the USA, Mexico and Canada.
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The team is first in its qualifying group for the US World Cup, with three wins and one draw
Most of the team’s members played for the country’s two biggest clubs, Al Merrick and Al Hilal, both from the city of Omdurman, separated from the capital Khartoum by the Nile River, but since the war broke out 19 months ago they have had to move their trade to safer places. All of them (captain Ramadan Agab, goalkeeper Mohamed Mustafa, top scorer Mohamed Abdelraman, midfielder Walieldin Khedr…) have lost loved ones and seen family and friends murdered, either by the SAF (National Army) or by the rebels of the RSF (Rapid Support Force), the two rival factions in the civil war that is taking place mainly in the northern region and in the west of the country.
When they have the opportunity, the players leave their places of exile for a few days and visit refugee camps such as Zarzar (in Darfur, the main focus of hostilities) and Adre, in Chad, just a few kilometers from the town of Al Geneina, which has been completely devastated. More than one hundred thousand people live in its tents and find in football a way to forget. “In Sudan we say that whoever has been able to escape with his passport, his mobile phone and his life can consider himself lucky,” says captain Agab, whose dream is to play in the Premier League, like his compatriots Jordan Ayew (Leicester), Antoine Semenyo (Bournemouth) and Mohamed Kudus (West Ham).
“Football is a symbol of freedom for people who are prisoners of their destiny,” philosophically believes the national coach, the Ghanaian James Kwasi Appiah, who has orchestrated access to the final phase of the Afcon with a goalless draw against Angola, and the provisional first place in the World Cup qualifying group, with Mauritania, Senegal, South Sudan, Togo and the Democratic Republic of Congo as rivals. The first will automatically get a place, and the second will go to the play-offs.
“My most important job is not to correct the players’ tactical errors, ask them to press or tell them what position they should occupy on the field, but to comfort them every time they receive the news that someone in their family has died or disappeared, which it happens continuously. “It’s something I wouldn’t wish on any coach or on my worst enemies,” explains Appiah, the Sudanese coach. But we have an important job to do, and that job is to win and in that way make happy people who have lost everything, who have seen their parents, their children and their brothers die, while the world looks the other way.”
Soccer in Sudan
The decline and resurrection of ‘the falcons of Jediane’
Football came to Sudan from Egypt, where it was popularized by British colonizers. Its federation is one of the oldest in Africa, it joined FIFA in 1948 and produced in the sixties and seventies a golden generation of players (Mustafa Azhari, Nasr el Din Abbas, Siddiq Manzur, Ali Gagarin…) who conquered as hosts of the African Cup of Nations in 1970. It is so far the only trophy in the showcases of the so-called Jediane falcons. After five decades of darkness and defeats, and despite exile due to the war, the team is now going through a sweet moment.
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